Zero fail, p.41
Zero Fail, page 41
Weaver was shocked, but she soon found information that shook her even more. Edwards’s investigators had found documents illustrating that a check of intelligence community records had raised concerns about one of the prostitutes in Cartagena. Edwards’s team wrote in their draft that his office had begun investigating whether Director Mark Sullivan had made false statements to Congress. “USSS officials knew” that a CIA report had flagged one of the prostitutes as possibly being linked to a criminal cartel, the draft report said. But Sullivan had told Congress there was no derogatory information found about any of the women.
It was hard to believe a politically savvy and cautious government official like Sullivan would knowingly lie to Congress. But clearly, Weaver thought, Sullivan hadn’t told the full truth on several scores.
There was one final paragraph in the report that grabbed Weaver’s attention. It had little to do with Secret Service. But she quickly recognized that in the midst of Obama’s reelection campaign, it was a stick of political dynamite.
Investigators said Secret Service personnel reported that they’d discovered a member of the White House advance team was listed as having brought a prostitute to his room overnight while working the Cartagena trip. The report cited records provided by the Hilton hotel and Secret Service investigators’ interviews with senior Hilton officials as evidence implicating the advance staffer. This member of the White House advance team was the son of a prominent Obama donor and lobbyist who had partnered with the White House on several of its high-profile policy goals. Weaver thought the staffer’s identity didn’t matter; Obama’s senior advisers would never want the phrase “White House” to be tied to the Cartagena prostitution mess.
In letters to lawmakers, in congressional testimony, and in public press conferences, Sullivan and White House officials had repeatedly insisted there was no evidence of White House personnel being involved in the Cartagena incident.
Senator Ron Johnson was elated. Because of his staff director’s pluck, the first-term Republican senator was sitting on a pile of juicy material that nobody else had. It suggested that the Obama administration had misled Congress.
On October 19, Senator Johnson issued a press release with a nine-page memo Weaver drafted. It outlined the major chasm between what Sullivan and the White House claimed and what the investigators found. The discrepancies, Johnson said, “suggest the administration misled or withheld information from Congress.” A few news organizations got an early peek at the evidence contradicting the official Obama administration account. Breitbart News led the story with the headline DHS Alleges Perjury. CNN played it with less edge: “A new investigation reportedly contradicts prior official testimony.”
Johnson should have felt like a GOP hero. He’d produced evidence indicating the Obama administration had been trying to cover up any hint that White House staff were connected to the prostitution scandal—and released it on the eve of the election. Chairman Lieberman, a Democratic-leaning senator, attacked the release as an “unauthorized leak” that was grossly unfair to Sullivan. But Johnson’s fellow Republican, ranking member Susan Collins, was also furious. She called Edwards demanding answers. How had a staffer for a lower-ranking committee member gotten hold of the draft report before her? Following the pattern of many lawmakers responsible for overseeing the Secret Service, Collins had little interest in deeply probing this agency of self-sacrificing patriots.
Johnson found himself pilloried by his Republican superior on the committee. But Weaver was just getting started.
* * *
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PRESIDENT OBAMA SEIZED victory and a second term in the White House, winning slightly more than 51 percent of the vote in the November 2012 election. Meanwhile, Director Sullivan was hoping to leave the administration with credit for the good work he had done rather than just the blame for Cartagena. As 2012 wound to a close, Sullivan felt he had weathered the equivalent of a Category 3 storm for seven straight months. Each week brought a new torrent of investigators’ questions, lawmakers demanding answers, and second-guessing from all camps, including from his own deputies. He’d suffered an insurrection; some of his own lieutenants had told internal investigators that the director had lied to Congress about whether any of the Cartagena prostitutes posed an intelligence or criminal concern—a felony—raising the specter of a criminal investigation. Two of Sullivan’s trusted deputies told investigators that when they briefed Sullivan the day before his hearing, they told him they highly doubted the hit was a true match to the prostitute, but they were still trying to verify the information. Sullivan would later produce a declaration from his chief of staff that one briefer told Sullivan the “hit” was most likely false and said: “It’s not our girl.” Asked why he made such a conclusive statement to Congress if the information was still being checked, Sullivan told internal investigators: “I don’t know. I just answer what they tell me.” In the end, investigators concluded they did not have evidence to show Sullivan knowingly lied.
* * *
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NOW, AS THE Christmas holidays neared, Sullivan charted his exit amid some good news. The Justice Department had concluded that the facts about Sullivan’s testimony didn’t merit a criminal probe. Also, a new draft report by the inspector general concluded that Sullivan had acted “expeditiously and thoroughly” to investigate the misconduct in the Cartagena incident.
The director knew that his name and thirty-year career might forever be linked in history to the humiliating bad-boy behavior of Secret Service agents in Cartagena. But he hoped this last report would snuff out any speculation that the scandal was forcing him to leave the agency. Sullivan had been discreetly planning to form a security consulting company with Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano’s chief of staff, Noah Kroloff. Sullivan had struggled at times to win the money the Service needed to modernize. Now the pair of government executives had found a wealthy partner willing to stake their new security company through which they would sell their advice and internal know-how to corporate clients and contractors seeking to win federal dollars and influence policy.
Sullivan notified Secretary Napolitano and the White House of his plan to retire at the end of February and offered to recommend a handful of top contenders to be his successor. He suggested four candidates. But he was really recommending only one.
He privately lobbied Kroloff to select his first choice, David O’Connor. O’Connor, fifty-seven, from Boston, had cut his teeth on protection during the Clinton White House years. He had won broad respect for his rigor as an agent, yet his management style evoked strong, divergent feelings among the rank and file. Some agents considered O’Connor an unforgiving boss and a fearsome presence. Some felt he set a high bar and was the best leader they’d ever worked for.
Sullivan separately told the contenders—Deputy Director A. T. Smith, his chief of staff, Julia Pierson, and assistant director Faron Paramore—that each was on a short list he had recommended to the White House. Sullivan asked them not to discuss it with others in order to ensure a fair process. Smith, as deputy director, took comfort in the belief that he was the natural heir apparent. Pierson, whom Sullivan had sidelined to the chief of staff job, shrugged off Sullivan’s recommendation, figuring she was tossed in as the token female. Word quickly spread that three candidates had made it to the second round and had come to the West Wing for an interview: O’Connor, Smith, and Pierson. In a first for the interview for a Secret Service director, the interview panel was made up entirely of women: White House counsel Kathy Ruemmler, White House deputy chief of staff Alyssa Mastromonaco, Obama senior adviser Valerie Jarrett, and the First Lady’s chief of staff, Tina Tchen.
The West Wing panel was impressed with the straight-talking O’Connor. He had successfully managed some complicated high-wire assignments, including the party conventions, the massive presidential campaign, and the pope’s visit. Smith turned the panel members off. One aide thought he looked disappointed in his interviewers. In late February, only O’Connor and Pierson got to the third round: a meeting with the president.
Obama was holding Pierson’s résumé in his hand when she walked into the Oval Office. The president asked Pierson to explain what drew her to the Secret Service. He never asked about her ideas for the agency. He was curious about something else. “What has it been like to be a woman in the Secret Service?” the president asked.
Pierson locked eyes with the first Black president. Almost instinctively, she replied, “You know.”
She regretted it straightaway, fretting that it was too direct a thing to say. But Obama nodded and looked down, seeming to understand.
About two weeks later, Kroloff called Pierson in the morning to tell her the president had chosen the twenty-third director of the Secret Service: David O’Connor. “You did a great job in the interview and we appreciate your participation. You’re a great candidate, and don’t let this get to you,” Kroloff told her. A special alert went from headquarters to the agents in charge of major divisions to prepare them: O’Connor would be the next director. Word spread rapidly through the agency on that Friday, March 1. By Monday, Reuters had reported—citing anonymous sources—that he was the expected choice.
But by Wednesday that week, Reuters had a new take on the story. They revived old reporting from 2008 about the racist email O’Connor had received at work from his brother. The five-year-old story was something anyone could find in a Google search. But it was unwelcome news to the Obama White House and to Secretary Napolitano. Many in the agency, including O’Connor, believed Smith had orchestrated the story to attack him.
That same day, the National Organization for Black Law Enforcement Officers wrote to the White House chief of staff urging them not to choose O’Connor. The group, with more than twenty-five hundred members, warned “nothing will change” with Secret Service minority hiring or morale if the White House put O’Connor in charge. Interestingly, the group urged the White House to choose A. T. Smith instead.
Obama’s chief defender, adviser Valerie Jarrett, was furious. Once again, the Secret Service had made the president and his White House operation look foolish. Team Obama was already facing criticism for a lack of diversity in its second-term appointments. Jarrett disliked leaks more than anyone else in the West Wing. She had ample reason to conclude that Smith was the architect behind the stories, and she certainly wasn’t going to reward that kind of slick move. The White House search for a new director went dark. A few days later, Napolitano called O’Connor. She asked if he would consider withdrawing his name from the running.
“I’ve already considered it,” he said tersely. “I’m out.” O’Connor was furious at having an old—and what he considered unfair—smear recycled in the national news. Someone hoping to block him from the director’s job had tried to brand him as a racist, and that someone, he felt with certainty, was Smith.
Two weeks later, on March 26, Smith was leading a senior executive meeting when an administrative assistant stepped into the director’s conference room. The aide told Pierson she had an important call she needed to step out to take. When Pierson got to her office, the voice on the other end of the line was Janet Napolitano’s.
“Julie, this is Janet,” she said. “A little later today, the president is going to announce the selection of the twenty-third director.” There was a pause. “You’re going to be the next director of the Secret Service.”
Pierson said nothing for a few moments, then thank you, then goodbye. She was shocked. She sat at her desk a minute, letting the honor sink in. She chuckled to herself, and then called her mother in Florida.
She would be the first female director in the Secret Service’s 148 years.
CHAPTER 23
A LISTING SHIP
Other than a dinner out with a small group of friends at the Carlyle in nearby Shirlington, Virginia, Julia Pierson didn’t really take time to celebrate this all-time career high. She started work two days after the president’s announcement of the Secret Service’s first female director. Lawmakers applauded what Homeland Security chairman Tom Carper called a “proud milestone” in the agency’s history. In truth, the White House and lawmakers were crossing their fingers and hoping a woman would put all the Service’s bad-boy problems to rest.
“During the Colombia prostitution scandal, the Secret Service lost the trust of many Americans and failed to live up to the high expectations placed on it,” said Senator Chuck Grassley, the ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee. “Ms. Pierson has a lot of work ahead of her to create a culture that respects the important job the agency is tasked with. I hope she succeeds in restoring lost credibility [to] the Secret Service.”
In her first days on the job, Pierson wasn’t focused on misconduct. She was worried about money. On day two, she made an appointment to visit David Haun, a longtime career manager and deputy associate director at the White House’s Office of Management and Budget. The somewhat intimidating White House budget master had helped oversee the Secret Service’s budget for three decades. He had never been very impressed by the agency’s justifications for its spending.
When she sat down with Haun in his office, it was her second week on the job. She knew him well from her time as chief of staff, and she knew the depth of the Secret Service’s budget hole even better. This blunt conversation couldn’t wait. “I’m here because I need to declare bankruptcy,” she told him.
Haun and a DHS budget officer listening in remotely chuckled, not sure if she was kidding. “No,” the director said. “I’m serious. I’m here to tell you we are beyond our tipping point. We have made decisions that have impacted our operations and our staffing. I’m declaring bankruptcy on behalf of the Secret Service.”
She laid out the problem. To meet mandated budget cuts, the Service hadn’t hired anybody since 2011. The agency was down more than six hundred employees below the number Congress had authorized them to hire—the bare-bones number they needed for a growing list of missions. The waves of Uniformed Division officer resignations—as many as a hundred a year—could no longer be ignored. Officers were fleeing simply because they were tired of working more than half of their days off, with no end in sight.
The day she walked on the job, Pierson said, she found that eighty-six supervisory positions were vacant. Sullivan had left them open to save money on relocating supervisors to the offices where they were needed. Another eighty-five agents on the president’s and vice president’s protective details and special operators on the detail needed to be transferred and replaced immediately. They had been doing their pressure-cooker jobs longer than six years at this point, but they should have rotated out after four years. Forcing them to stay helped save money—the cost to move them out and move their replacements in to Washington, D.C.—but the extended assignments were, to use the director’s catchphrase, “cruel and unusual.”
Pierson told Haun and her department budget chief she needed money ASAP to restart hiring. She had hundreds of staff positions to fill, holes that increased the chance of error—and of catastrophe.
Haun grasped the urgency now. But, he cautioned, he couldn’t snap his fingers and come up with money. The federal government was in the middle of determining the 2015 fiscal year budget. The ink on the 2014 fiscal year budget plan was already dry and awaiting the president’s signature, he said. That meant she wouldn’t be able to lasso any money for her current staffing crisis until the start of fiscal year 2015, about eighteen months away.
Pierson’s blunt talk about filing for Chapter 11 protection, however, made an immediate impression. The department’s budget officer scrounged around and found Pierson $37 million he decided to “reprogram” from Homeland Security’s larger components, mostly the U.S. Coast Guard. The money hit the Service’s bank account in August. With money in the bank, Pierson made her first list of promotions in late August, filling seventy-six empty supervisor positions and transferring another sixty-five exhausted agents off their Washington details. The money wasn’t enough to completely plug the slow leak in the boat, but it helped keep it temporarily above water.
Next she set her sights on cranking up the Service’s frozen hiring system. She suggested the recruiting team set a goal of hiring forty-eight people—especially officers, who desperately needed reinforcements at the White House—in time for them to start the Secret Service’s academy training in October.
But the remnants of the Cartagena scandal, and a determined Hill staffer, continued to stalk the agency and its new director. On top of that, a fresh round of bad-boy behavior and stupidity was soon to erupt. In mid-June, a little more than two months after she started, Pierson had to tackle her first major misconduct case. It didn’t go smoothly.
It was 3:30 a.m. on a Wednesday in mid-June when a concerned security official at the landmark Hay-Adams hotel called the Secret Service. The hotel official said a female guest was complaining about a Secret Service agent who had gone upstairs with her to her room after a night of heavy drinking at the hotel’s “Off the Record” bar. She had become panicky after they got to her room and she realized he had a gun. He offered to take the round out of the chamber. Soon after, she told him she wanted him to leave and asked a hotel security guard to escort him out, records show. But the agent later came back.
The man was a high-ranking Secret Service supervisor named Ignacio Zamora, Jr., a member of the agency for two decades who worked on President Obama’s protective detail. Zamora, better known inside the Service as Nacho, had agreed to leave the woman’s room at around 2 a.m., but soon doubled back. He asked the hotel security guard on duty if he could return to the room so he could get a money clip he left behind. The real reason: He had taken the bullet out of his gun while in her room and now needed to get it back. Zamora denied being with the Secret Service when the security officer asked. When the officer went to talk to the female guest, Zamora became anxious and left the hotel, raising the hotel’s suspicions even more. Zamora, who had drunk enough that he and the female hotel guest decided he shouldn’t drive, was scheduled to report to the White House for work in just a few more hours.
