A pair of Secret Service agents, one a member of the president’s protective detail, are being investigated for crashing a car into a barricade outside the White House last week.
The March 4 incident occurred late at night, an agency report says. The officers were said to have been at a drinking party earlier that evening.
The Secret Service reported that an officer on duty that night wanted to detain the two involved in the accident. That official also wanted to administer a drug and alcohol test. Reportedly, another senior officer ruled that the two were to be let go without any sobriety tests performed.
This incident is just another spot of bad publicity for a troubled security service that recently saw director Julia Pierson resign over an increase in such incidents.
In September, the former director had been confronted by members of the House Oversight Committee on why it took a housekeeper to discover that the White House had been fired upon.
Only weeks before that a man jumped the White House fence and wasn’t subdued until he ran into the president’s residence. That fence jumping incident was only one of several such incidents in 2014.
These incidents are made worse by a scandal that occurred in 2011 in Cartagena, Colombia where 13 Secret Service agents were accused of having wild parties and hiring prostitutes while on duty during the president’s overseas visit.
The Service essentially lost a director as a result of that scandal, too.
Current director Joseph Clancy is the third director in only two years.
Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter: @warnerthuston. Email the author at igcolonel@hotmail.com.