From The Dallas Morning News:
Watchdog: Dallas woman discovers new Secret Service sex scandals through public information requests
"A lot of people think I'm nuts to pursue this."
The speaker is a self-described Dallas stay-at-home mom who spent $100,000 in legal fees to expose a culture of corruption in the U.S. Secret Service.
She filed 89 Freedom of Information Acts (89!) and discovered enough Secret Service scandals and cover-ups that even Bob Woodward would be impressed.
For this, she got very little public attention. Until now.
A bit more:
When the first Secret Service sex scandals broke a few years ago, she grew curious. A former senior partner at Thompson & Knight law firm in Dallas, she knew that federal law allows us to see government documents.
She began filing requests with the U.S. Department Homeland Security to learn of any incidents of agent misbehavior in the Secret Service, any investigations and disciplinary action.
I'll skip ahead to the end of her multi-year legal battle that ensued. She won. In the end, she received 3,914 pages, some of them so hot they almost burn the fingers.
A short list:
- A culture of "wheels up; rings off" meant even married agents could party on foreign trips.
- Secret Service K-9 units brought their dogs into their hotel room, which the dogs trashed. The agents made payoffs so the incident wouldn't be reported.
- A agent who missed his flight later showed up drunk with two prostitutes. He was not disciplined.
- Agents "engaged" with prostitutes in Amsterdam's red-light district during an advance team trip.
- A supervisor choked a female subordinate because she rejected his sexual advances.
- A supervisor offered a subordinate a larger office in return for sex.
- A supervisor took a subordinate to a sex show while on duty.
- A male agent's gun was stolen by a male prostitute he solicited online. The gun was never recovered.
- A manager in the National Threat Assessment Center forced employees to drink alcohol in his office "so that he could trust them." The same manager was accused of multiple incidents of sexual harassment.
And she is suing to recover her costs and the judge says:
Senior U.S. District Judge Sam R. Cummings ruled that Litman "has not shown she is entitled to an award because she has not shown that her pursuit of records involves a legitimate public benefit."
The judge cites as precedent another case that found "that generally increasing public knowledge about the government is not a legitimate public benefit."
Time to clean house all the way down from the top to the bottom.
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