In the midst of the 2012
reelection campaign, the White House appears to have covered up a
story involving a presidential advance team member, a prostitute,
and Secret Service agents, allowing the Secret Service to take the
fall while denying the involvement of anyone on the
advance-team.
That’s the takeaway from
a damning Washington Post report which finds that,
according to both documentary and interview evidence, “senior White
House aides were given information at the time suggesting that a
prostitute was an overnight guest in the hotel room of a
presidential advance-team member — yet that information was never
thoroughly investigated or publicly acknowledged.”
The story here revolves
around a 2012 incident in which Secret Service agents were
accused of drinking to excess and hiring a prostitute during a trip
to Cartegena, Columbia, in preparation for a trip to the city by
President Obama. Ten Secret Service agents were eventually fired in
the scandal, but the White House publicly insisted that no
administration staffer was involved.
Former White House press secretary Jay Carney, for example, said
in April 2012 that “there have been no specific, credible
allegations of misconduct by anyone on the White House advance team
or the White House staff,” and that after, a review, the White
House’s council’s office said that no member of the advance team
was involved in “improper” behavior.
On the contrary, according to the Post, another
investigation within the Department of Homeland Security’s
inspector general’s office found evidence suggesting that a White
House advance team member was, in fact, involved. An investigator
on the case contends that the evidence to that effect was
suppressed:
The lead investigator later told Senate staffers that he felt
pressure from his superiors in the office of Charles K. Edwards,
who was then the acting inspector general, to withhold evidence —
and that, in the heat of an election year, decisions were being
made with political considerations in mind.“We were directed at the time . . . to delay the report of the
investigation until after the 2012 election,” David Nieland, the
lead investigator on the Colombia case for the DHS inspector
general’s office, told Senate staffers, according to three people
with knowledge of his statement.Nieland added that his superiors told him “to withhold and alter
certain information in the report of investigation because it was
potentially embarrassing to the administration.”
The Post reports that those in the IG’s office
who wanted to pursue questions about White House involvement were
dealt with:
Within the inspector general’s office, investigators and their
bosses fought heatedly with each other over whether to pursue White
House team members’ possible involvement. Office staffers who
raised questions about a White House role said they were put on
administrative leave as a punishment for doing so.
Not surprisingly, the Secret Service wasn’t—and apparently still
isn’t—pleased with the fact that the White House failed to look
into the behavior of its own team members even while many agents
were being fired.
Adding to the intrigue is that the advance team member who may
have been involved in the incident (his lawyer denies it) was a
25-year-old son of a lobbyist and Obama donor who also ended up
working for the administration on the implementation health care
law. Back to the Post:
Whether the White House volunteer, Jonathan Dach, was involved
in wrongdoing in Cartagena, Colombia, remains unclear. Dach, then a
25-year-old Yale University law student, declined to be
interviewed, but through his attorney he denied hiring a prostitute
or bringing anyone to his hotel room. Dach has long made the same
denials to White House officials.Dach this year started working full time in the Obama
administration on a federal contract as a policy adviser in the
Office on Global Women’s Issues at the State Department.Dach’s father, Leslie Dach, is a prominent Democratic donor who
gave $23,900 to the party in 2008 to help elect Obama. In his
previous job as a top lobbyist for Wal-Mart, he partnered with the
White House on high-profile projects, including Michelle Obama’s
“Let’s Move!” campaign.He, too, joined the Obama administration this year. In July, he
was named a senior counselor with the Department of Health and
Human Services, where part of his responsibilities include handling
the next phase of the Affordable Care Act.
The details are complex, and the actual “misconduct”—hiring a
prostitute in Colombia, where it’s legal to do so—is perhaps
politically embarrassing but hardly misconduct at all, and
certainly not the sort of thing likely to swing a not-very-close
national election. And yet the administration apparently chose to
delay findings and mislead the press about what happened
anyway.
So the short version is this: The administration had evidence
indicating that a young advance team member, who was also the child
of a lobbyist-and-donor-turned-administration-staffer, was involved
in a potentially embarrassing incident with a prostitute while
serving as a member of the presidential advance team—and yet
explicitly denied that this was the case, and also appears to have
pressured independent investigators to delay and withhold evidence
until after the election was over.
And the question the story raises is: If the White House was so
determined to cover up this embarassing but relatively minor
incident, what larger stories has the White House supressed or
covered up that we don’t know about?
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