OPINION:
By Dec. 15, a blue-ribbon panel is slated to recommend a new Secret Service director to the secretary of Homeland Security. If the panel has any doubt that an outside director is needed to reform the agency, it need look no further than the recent congressional testimony of Acting Secret Service Director Joseph P. Clancy.
Indeed, in his testimony before the House Judiciary Committee, Mr. Clancy, a former career agent, unwittingly displayed everything that is wrong with the once-elite Secret Service.
Mr. Clancy rose to head the Presidential Protective Division, then left for the private sector. After Director Julia Pierson was forced out, Mr. Clancy agreed to President Obama’s request that he serve as acting director.
During the congressional hearing, Republican Rep. Jason Chaffetz of Utah made the point that the Secret Service’s code of conduct prescribes disciplinary action leading up to removal for anyone who gives out false information. Yet after the intrusion at the White House by Omar J. Gonzalez, the Secret Service issued statements saying he had been apprehended after entering the White House’s North Portico doors and that a search revealed no weapons. As The Washington Post later reported, both statements were false. Mr. Gonzalez was finally apprehended deep inside the White House, and a search immediately revealed that he was armed with a knife.
While Mr. Clancy conceded that the information the Secret Service issued was untrue, he insisted that those responsible for the misinformation should not face any consequences. Even though the Secret Service knew immediately that Mr. Gonzalez had penetrated the White House and was armed with a knife, Mr. Clancy never batted an eye when he claimed that the Secret Service did not intentionally mislead the public. Yet when asked how he knew the obvious lies were not purposeful, Mr. Clancy admitted he had no idea how the false statements came to be made.
Thus, dedicated agent though he was, Mr. Clancy demonstrated the management culture that has led to the Secret Service’s disastrous laxness, a culture that covers up problems and avoids imposing accountability. Equally shocking, Mr. Clancy insisted that when Secret Service management diverted agents assigned to the Prowler team at the White House to instead protect Director Mark Sullivan’s assistant at her home in Maryland 30 miles southeast of Washington, it did not compromise the security of Mr. Obama and his family.
As the Marine One helicopter lifts off from the White House, the Prowler team watches for snipers. The team also responds to any threat that may arise at the White House itself. Obviously, without these assets, the president was more vulnerable to an attack. Still, to support his point, Mr. Clancy said a Department of Homeland Security inspector general report quoted Secret Service officials making the absurd claim that withdrawing the assets did not compromise the president’s protection.
While Mr. Clancy conceded that sending agents from the White House to protect the director’s assistant represented “poor judgment,” he failed to note that the Secret Service has no legal authority to protect its own employees. As reported in my book “The First Family Detail,” retrieving confidential law enforcement records on the assistant’s neighbor therefore violated criminal laws.
One of the Secret Service’s biggest problems is a management culture that boasts, “We make do with less.” As a result, the agency’s infrastructure is crumbling, and agents and uniformed officers are simply tired because they are forced to work long overtime hours and forgo days off. Yet despite Mr. Clancy’s acknowledgment that Secret Service uniformed officers at the White House were tired and that more time is needed for training, he maintained that aside from minor adjustments, the agency’s staffing levels are “appropriate at this time.”
Mr. Clancy said he wants agents to voice their concerns and suggestions anonymously to the agency’s ombudsman. However, everyone in the agency knows that agents have little faith that the ombudsman will keep identities confidential, much less propose the kind of meaningful reforms that would avert a tragedy.
What is needed is the kind of accountability Mr. Chaffetz was proposing to change a culture that fosters dishonesty, punishes agents who point out problems and potential threats, and promotes obsequious agents who maintain the pretext that the Secret Service can overcome any problem with its meager budget. With his less-than-forthright testimony, Mr. Clancy established himself as a poster child for that culture. Yet with the exception of Mr. Chaffetz, Mr. Clancy’s bowing-and-scraping style seemed to win over the members of the committee.
To reform the Secret Service the agency needs a director from outside the agency who will be immune from that culture and not beholden to entrenched bureaucrats within the agency. Given that the FBI has done a remarkable job of preventing a successful foreign terrorist attack since Sept. 11, 2001, a former high-ranking FBI official would be an ideal choice.
Whoever is named, if the Secret Service is to regain its once-admired reputation and stop corner-cutting that could lead to an assassination, that person must have a mentality that is the opposite of the one displayed by its acting director.
• Ronald Kessler, a former Washington Post and Wall Street Journal investigative reporter, is the author of “The First Family Detail: Secret Service Agents Reveal the Hidden Lives of the Presidents” (Crown Forum, 2014).
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