Looks like the dust still hasn’t settled-in as AP is reporting that more heads will roll over the Secret Service scandal. The chairman of a House committee is investigating the Secret Service prostitution scandal and has predicted that more firings are expected.
“Every possible lead is being examined,” said Rep. Peter King, who heads the House Homeland Security Committee. King, R-N.Y., said he expected that in the “near future, several other” members of the Secret Service will leave.
“What they were thinking is beyond me,” King told NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
So far, the scandal includes 12 Secret Service employees and 11 military members.
Six of whom have already lost their jobs. One has been cleared and five remain on administrative leave. The main incident occurred shortly before Obama arrived for a meeting of regional presidents last weekend.
A Secret Service official confirmed Sunday that one of the 12 implicated in the scandal was staying at a different hotel than the others.
He was staying at the Hilton, where Obama eventually would stay, said the official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the official was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly. The agent is being investigated for improprieties in a separate incident that may have happened on April 9, days before the president arrived and while the hotel was still open to the general public.
Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, the senior Republican on the Homeland Security Committee, and Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., both said that more female Secret Service agents might help guard against such incidents from happening again.
“I can’t help but wonder if there had been more women as part of that detail, if this ever would have happened,” Collins said on ABC’s “This Week.”
Maloney told the same program that only 11 percent of the Secret Service’s agents are women.
“I can’t help but keeping asking this question: Where are the women? We probably need to diversify the service and have more minorities and more women,” Maloney said.
More women in Secret Service will solve this problem ? What is Sen. Susan Collins trying to say here ??
Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, told NBC that the episode was “something the Secret Service can fix. We have confidence that it will be fixed.”
“The most important thing is that this never happens again,” Issa said.
Ralph Basham, a former Secret Service Director, told CBS the behavior of those implicated in the scandal “could have compromised the trip and the safety of the president.”