GOP lawmaker blames White House for low Secret Service morale

The Obama administration is being blasted by a Republican lawmaker for giving a State Department job to a volunteer questioned during the Secret Service’s prostitution scandal.

Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), who many expect to be elected as House Oversight and Government Reform Committee chairman in the next Congress, said the decision reeks of a double standard and has hurt morale at the Secret Service.

{mosads}“He’s now working on global women’s issue — the Office of Global Women’s issues at the State Department,” Chaffetz said of the volunteer during a Thursday appearance on Fox News. “I just — it really is offensive to the morale of the Secret Service, the men and women who served. They got reprimand. They got fired.”

The Washington Post reported Wednesday that Jonathan Dach, a Yale University law student who volunteered on the president’s advance squad, was questioned by the White House Counsel’s Office during its investigation into the 2012 incident, when Secret Service agents were discovered to have hired prostitutes ahead of the president’s trip to Colombia.

A hotel record indicated Dach, the son of a prominent Democratic donor, had registered a woman as his overnight guest at his Cartagena hotel room. That woman, the Post said, advertised herself on the Internet as a prostitute.

According to administration officials, the White House Counsel eventually determined that the hotel record was not credible and that they believed Dach’s claims that he had not hired a prostitute.

White House spokesman Eric Schultz said Thursday that the counsel’s office talked to officials on the trip, talked to Dach, and found “no corroborating evidence” of the allegations.

“We stand by the review,” Schultz said.

But the White House has not released information detailing how that determination was made to the public. Earlier this month, Chaffetz wrote White House chief of staff Denis McDonough to demand that the administration turn over its internal report on the topic.

Meanwhile, Dach has been hired to work full time at the State Department.

The Post report suggested that members of the Secret Service were upset there had been a double standard over the way Dach’s case was handled. Nearly two dozen Secret Service agents and military personnel were fired or suspended over similar incidents.

Chaffetz echoed those concerns on Thursday and said he was also worried that the handling of Dach’s case could hurt morale at the Department of Homeland Security. 

David Nieland, the lead investigator of the Colombia case for DHS, told the Post he felt political pressure to withhold information about Dach from his final report, and three members of the inspector general’s office were put on administrative leave. They told the Post they believed those suspensions were due to complaints they raised over editing of the inspector general reports.

“If you want to solve the morale problems down there, why are we holding these people?” Chaffetz said. “Why were those three people put on administrative leave? I find it more than coincidental that you had three people who were asking tough questions and believe that information should have been given to the public.”

A bipartisan Senate committee investigating the panel found they could not substantiate the charges from Nieland that the IG report was edited for political reasons.