WASHINGTON, (Reuters) – A Republican senator yesterday accused the head of the U.S. Secret Service of making potentially misleading statements to Congress about a prostitution scandal involving agency employees before a presidential trip to Colombia in April.
Senator Ron Johnson, the senior Republican on the Homeland Security subcommittee on oversight of government management, issued a memo detailing his concerns about Secret Service Director Mark Sullivan’s statements to Congress on May 23.
“There are discrepancies between public statements and information uncovered in the independent investigation led by the Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General that suggest the administration misled or withheld information from Congress,” Johnson said in the 9-page memo to the full Homeland Security Committee.
Johnson said he issued the memo after his staff reviewed the inspector general’s investigation report on the scandal, which has not been publicly released. His memo came three weeks before the Nov. 6 elections and appeared to irk others on the panel.
Homeland Security Committee Chairman Joe Lieberman, an independent, while not mentioning Johnson by name said: “This unauthorized leak of sensitive, selective information from the IG’s report is unfair to the United States Secret Service and its director, Mark Sullivan.”
In the biggest scandal to ever hit the agency, about a dozen Secret Service employees were accused of misconduct for bringing women, some of them prostitutes, back to their hotel rooms ahead of a visit by President Barack Obama to Cartagena, Colombia.
