In what may be the biggest scandal in the history of the Secret Service, during a visit to Cartagena, Colombia in South America, eleven Secret Service agents allegedly brought women who were “presumed prostitutes” back to their hotel rooms on Wednesday evening.
The employees consisted of both special agents and uniformed division officers, none assigned to directly protect Obama. The incident happened before the President had even arrived in Colombia.
The Secret Service agents were put on administrative leave on Saturday as congressmen briefed the situation to President Obama.
A thorough investigation will be conducted for the allegations. Fortunately, the actions of the 11 Secret Service agents had no impact on their ability to execute a security plan for Obama’s visit to South America.
Prostitution is legal in certain “tolerance zones” in Columbia. However, the police filed an incident report with the United States Embassy for the alleged misconduct.
The head of the House Homeland Security Committee, Peter King, stated the obvious when he said that conduct such of this nature should absolutely not be tolerated — especially when it compromised the agents themselves, America’s national security, and potentially the president.
Obama said on Sunday, in his first public remarks of the scandal, that he would be angry if the allegations reported against the agents are true.
The main concern here is that things like this must have happened before, because otherwise it would not have happened in this fashion. If this is the case, many agents need to reevaluate their behavior, if not, be terminated from the Secret Service.
The president pointed out that this incident was isolated, and gave his praise to the Secret Service as a whole saying, “these men and women perform extraordinary service on a day-to-day basis protecting me, my family, U.S. officials. They do very hard work under very stressful circumstances and almost invariably do an outstanding job.”
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