I noted at the hearing, “These people were being paid roughly in the neighborhood of about $120,000 a year. One of these employees finally retired after almost a year of paid leave. The other employee is still collecting his government salary and he too has been on paid administrative leave for almost a year. American taxpayers continue to pay this person. If you sit watching hours of porn on your government computer, fire them. Fire them. . . . This pattern of paid administrative leave followed by retirement with full benefits is totally and wholly unacceptable. It rewards bad behavior and leaves taxpayers footing the bill.”
My colleague on the Oversight Committee Elijah Cummings was equally repulsed by what we found out about the EPA. He took Acting Deputy Administrator Stanley Meiburg to task.
Cummings: If I were watching this, Mr. Meiburg, just watching C-SPAN, I would be disgusted. We are better than this. We are so, so, so much better. Just think . . . the sexual harassment issues. Are you married, Mr. Meiburg?
Meiburg: Yes, sir.
Cummings: The idea that your wife would come to work, after doing all the things she has to do to get ready in the morning and take care of her family, then she has to come and be harassed . . . Man, you would go crazy. . . . The idea that you have these folks who stay in the employment of our EPA, after having done these things, I just cannot get past . . . Something is missing and we are better than this. We are so much better. If you cannot do the job, you need to let somebody else get in there and do it because a lot of people are depending on government functioning properly. They just want to come to work, do their job, give them their blood, sweat, and tears and then go home, but then their morale gets destroyed when they see people coming back to work, they will get a little tap on the hand, come on back, welcome, watch some more porn. Give me a break, this is crazy. We are better than this.
The EPA, with a culture that takes a laissez-faire attitude toward sexual harassment, fraud, and other misconduct, a management that fails to act, and a lack of consequences for wrongdoing, is the perfect embodiment of the problem with the Deep State. Despite our best efforts at oversight and reforming this agency, very little has changed. In November 2016, yet another EPA employee in Region 5—where sexual harasser Paul Bertram worked—was indicted for having pornography on agency devices. Floyd O’Hara, sixty-two, allegedly stashed his illicit materials on eight EPA computers and servers and when caught, tried to destroy the evidence.
I was asked about this latest incident and commented, “The problems at EPA Region Five persist and worsen with each account. It is deplorable for an agency to have sunk to such toxic levels. Leadership from the very top is needed to restore the integrity of this office.”
The only good news is that this employee was not put on paid administrative leave. He was arrested and prosecuted.
In a war with few victories, this was a small but happy one.
Chapter 4
The Deep State Fights Back
One of my biggest problems—or I should say one of the biggest problems the Deep State had with me—was that I wouldn’t just accept their attempts to evade congressional oversight. I took my role as the chair of the House Oversight Committee very seriously. The American people are footing a tremendous bill for the federal budget, for millions of employees, contractors, and consultants. I understand the federal bureaucracy has become a fact of life. However, it doesn’t need to be out of control. It shouldn’t—and must not, if our democracy is to survive—be corrupt and dishonest. I still believed it was my job every day to ensure that the bureaucracy was running as fairly and efficiently as possible.
Obviously, that oversight role often placed me and other members of Congress in an adversarial role with the agencies and federal employees we investigated. But that natural tension is exactly what the Founders wisely designed—a system of checks and balances between the branches of government.
After all, the Swamp likes to keep us from physically inspecting their work, fails to punish malefactors, and wastes money at an improbable rate.
Might exposing that involve disagreement and discord? Probably. But that is Congress’s job. That disagreement must be transparent and open and fair.
That brings me to the topic of the U.S. Secret Service. First, a little history of this agency, which currently employs 6,500 people and has an annual budget of $1.6 billion.
The Secret Sex Service
This is how the Secret Service describes itself: “The United States Secret Service, one of the nation’s oldest federal investigative law enforcement agencies, was founded in 1865 as a branch of the U.S. Treasury Department. It was originally created to combat the counterfeiting of U.S. currency—a serious problem at the time. In fact, following the Civil War, it was estimated that one-third to one-half of the currency in circulation was counterfeit.”
So, while most people think of the Secret Service as the agency protecting the presidents and their families, it has always done a lot more. It is charged with far more authority than many people realize, and arguably its tasks are broadening every day. In 1996 the Secret Service was given the authority to investigate fictitious financial instruments of almost any sort; in 1998 the Telemarketing Fraud Prevention Act was passed, allowing for convictions associated with fraud in telemarketing. In 2003 the Secret Service was transferred from the Treasury Department to the new Department of Homeland Security, specifically to protect the critical financial infrastructure of the United States.
By 2008, over a five-year period, the Secret Service had made 29,000 arrests for counterfeiting, cybercrimes, and other financial misdeeds. Their conviction rate was 98 percent. By 2010 the service announced the creation of its second overseas Electronic Crimes Task Force (ECTF), a network of public-private partnerships dedicated to fighting high-tech, computer-based crimes. There are ECTF offices in the United Kingdom and in Rome.
In other words, the Secret Service is much more than a group of presidential bodyguards. The trust and reliance that the nation places in it cannot be overstated. The soundness of our nation’s currency, our global infrastructure—both are dependent on the protection of the Secret Service. Let’s call the agency what it is: one of the most powerful intelligence agencies on the planet.
That is what makes the egregious pattern of misconduct by the Secret Service in 2012, 2013, and 2014 so deeply troubling.
In April 2012, President Barack Obama headed to Cartagena, Colombia, for a Summit of the Americas, a gathering of thirty-three national leaders.
As usual the president was preceded a few days earlier by a team of Secret Service agents, most of whom checked into the Hotel Caribe.
What followed can only be described as a night of debauchery, dancing, copious amounts of alcohol, and prostitution. One of the prostitutes, Dania Suarez, actually wrote a book. About twenty prostitutes were involved with at least thirteen Secret Service agents.
There were investigations, confessions, enormous publicity, and both resignations and firings of the agents involved. Apparently this kind of behavior by agents protecting the president and representing the United States was not a one-off. Stories later emerged of earlier parties in China and Romania.
President Barack Obama, asked about all of this on Jimmy Fallon’s late-night television show, glibly called the agents “knuckleheads.” To me that was a tepid condemnation, hardly proportionate to the egregious misconduct.
Later, in October 2014, it emerged that there had been an actual cover-up at the White House, according to the Washington Post. “New details drawn from government documents and interviews show that senior White House aides were given information at the time suggesting that a prostitute was an overnight guest in the hotel room of a presidential advance-team member—yet that information was never thoroughly investigated or publicly acknowledged,” the Post reported.
In fact, the investigation into the entire incident was stymied by the White House. “We were directed at the time . . . to delay the report of the investigation until after th
e 2012 election,” David Nieland, the lead investigator on the Colombia case for the DHS inspector general’s office, told Senate staffers, according to the Post.
Here is another core idea every American needs to understand: the Deep State’s interests almost always align with a politician eager to cover it up. When a government employee does something wrong, his superiors look out for him, and the political officeholder above the superior is usually more than happy to see it fall down the memory hole.
The scandals just kept rolling along. In 2013, the management of the Hay-Adams Hotel, just a block from the White House, notified the Secret Service that an agent was attempting to reenter the room of a guest in the hotel, a woman he had met in the bar. She refused to let him in. Inexplicably, hotel security found a bullet in the room.
And then we have the March 4, 2015, incident at the White House. At about 10:25 p.m., a woman in a blue Toyota drove up to the southeast entrance of the White House on Fifteenth Street. She got out of her car with a package wrapped in a shirt and announced it was a bomb. She laid the item on the ground and returned to her car. Agents ran to the car, opened the passenger door, and managed to put the car in park. But the woman managed to put the car in reverse, accelerated, hit both the agents and a barrier, and sped off.
Police secured the area. All the precautions one can imagine were put in place while an inspection team was called in to examine the package on the ground. Yellow tape was set up, a perimeter was established—all the things one would expect when someone has driven onto the White House grounds and left what they said was a bomb.
Not far away that same evening, at the Fado Irish Pub, a retirement party was being held for a government employee. The party, consisting of about thirty to forty people, featured an open bar and was set for 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. Two Secret Service agents, Marc Connolly, a high-ranking agent with twenty-seven years of experience in the Presidential Protection Division, was at the party. Another agent, George Ogilvie, who had been with the service since 1996, also attended.
After the party ended, the pair and two non-agents stayed on at the bar, opening an alcohol tab with a credit card. All four left at 10:45 p.m., with Ogilvie driving his government-issued SUV carrying Connolly back to the White House to retrieve his car, which Connolly had left parked there.
At about 11 p.m., Ogilvie and Connolly approached the White House, showed their passes, then drove around the barriers, through police tape, past a temporary barricade, and into a barrel. They essentially drove through a crime scene, almost hitting the object that could have been a bomb. Supervisors at the scene believed the agents were drunk. Police wanted to arrest the agent. Incredibly, a more senior officer told them to let the agents go, according to the Washington Post.
All of this happened just a month after Joseph P. Clancy had been appointed the new director of the Secret Service, ostensibly to clean up the troubled agency.
Is this the way a top U.S. security service should be operating? Just wait. It gets worse.
Of course, it was the job of the House Oversight Committee, along with the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general, to investigate the incident.
The Deep State Comes for Me
At 10 a.m. on March 24, 2015, the committee convened to question Secret Service director Joseph Clancy about the incident, particularly the allegations that the agents breached a crime scene and were under the influence of alcohol.
I began questioning Director Clancy just after the hour.
By 10:18 a.m., a senior Secret Service agent working in the Office of Administration at headquarters logged on and put my name into the MCI Secret Service database. That database has been described as a 1980s-vintage system of records that houses information on a variety of people, including those under investigation, personnel, and past and present job applicants. It can contain personally identifiable information such as birth dates, Social Security numbers, and medical records.
There was no reason in the world to rummage through the database at that time looking for information on me—no legitimate reason, anyway.
Many years ago, I had applied for a job at the Secret Service. I confess I was not entirely serious at the time. I did not get the job, which was for the best. I think history has shown my talents can be better used elsewhere.
But within minutes, this agent found my old application. He called another agent in the Dallas field office, who then also accessed my application. By the end of the day, seven other agents had accessed my file. By the end of the next day, March 25, 2015, another thirteen agents had poked around. All told, the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general, examining computer records, found that forty-five Secret Service employees had accessed my record sixty times. Who were they and where were they? Well, a partial list:
Office of Government Affairs
Dallas Field Office
Phoenix Field Office
Charlotte Field Office
London Resident Office
Washington Field Office
Albany, Georgia, Resident Office
Sacramento Resident Office
Office of Strategic Intelligence and Information
Counter Surveillance Division
William Clinton Protective Division
Indianapolis Field Office
San Francisco Field Office
New Haven Resident Office
Boston Field Office
One agent told the IG that while he was in New York City the next day, guarding the president of Afghanistan, many of the seventy agents present were talking about it. The IG reported that disclosure of my information had likely spread to hundreds of people, both in and out of the Secret Service.
On March 31, assistant Secret Service director Ed Lowery wrote an email to fellow assistant director Faron Paramore. “Some information that he might find embarrassing needs to get out,” Lowery wrote. “Just to be fair.”
Well, “get it out there” they did. On April 2, 2015, the Daily Beast published the big story. Someone leaked the earth-shattering news of me applying to the Secret Service in 2002 or 2003 and being turned down. Headlined “Exclusive,” the story implied I was harboring some decades-long bitterness against the Secret Service rather than doing my job as a congressman.
When the Daily Beast reporter Tim Mak called me, he asked whether I harbored “ill will” toward the Secret Service. All I could think of was what I said: “That’s pretty funny, no.” I told him I might have applied to the FBI, too!
Since this was about me, it’s funny. However, a powerful federal intelligence agency violated a citizen’s basic rights. Many, many agents were involved. Initially Director Clancy said he wasn’t aware of the breach until April 1 . . . but in October the Washington Post reported that Clancy told investigators he heard “rumors” about the breach on March 25. He did nothing.
My colleagues on the House Oversight Committee were outraged, as were numerous colleagues on both sides of the aisle. Maryland representative Elijah Cummings, the ranking Democrat, was especially furious.
If federal agency employees can pull these illegal tricks on a congressman, imagine what they might do to a regular citizen?
So what happened to all the agents who violated essential trust in a critical intelligence agency—who broke laws?
On May 26, 2016, Reuters stated that Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson reported that forty-one Secret Service agents had been punished. How were they punished? Were they charged with a crime? Fired? If you’ve been paying attention so far, you know there were no such meaningful penalties.
Their “punishments” ranged from a letter of reprimand to suspensions without pay for up to forty-five days. One agent resigned.
Chapter 5
The War on Whistleblowers
The Department of Justice is without question a pillar of the Deep State. The situation sadly continues today under President Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions—unless Sessions is gone by the time you read this.
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br /> Deep State entrenchment in the DOJ is of particular concern because we count on Lady Justice to be blindfolded—objectively dispensing justice according to the law. The Justice Department is, arguably, the first line of defense against abuses both inside and outside the government. The DOJ should be protecting us. And yet it is the federal agency that stands head and shoulders above the rest in enabling the Swamp.
Let’s start with the numbers: The DOJ is one of the largest federal agencies, with 116,476 employees who receive a base compensation of $10.24 billion (fiscal 2016). Bonuses added another $29 million. The average compensation with benefits is $115,177. The highest-paid employee? The chief psychiatrist for the Federal Bureau of Prisons, who earned $260,000.
As chairman of the House Oversight Committee, I had a unique power. I could unilaterally subpoena anyone. I didn’t need a vote from my committee. I didn’t need permission from anyone. I could issue a subpoena to anyone. I could unilaterally haul them before Congress to testify under oath. Just as important was the authority to subpoena anyone in government to produce documents I wanted.
If I thought any federal agency was doing something wrong—anything questionable—and Congress wanted to ask about that action, whether it involved the IRS, the State Department, the Department of Veterans Affairs, even something like airline safety through the actions of the Federal Aviation Administration or the Department of Transportation or the National Transportation Safety Board, I could issue a subpoena.
The Deep State Page 5