Obama: ‘Angry’ if Secret Service allegations true

Pres­i­dent Barack Obama speaks dur­ing a joint news con­fer­ence with Colom­bian Pres­i­dent Juan Manuel San­tos dur­ing the 6th Sum­mit of the Amer­i­cas Sun­day in Carta­gena, Colom­bia. (Asso­ci­ated Press | Car­olyn Kaster)

JIM KUHNHENN

Asso­ci­ated Press

CARTAGENA, Colom­bia — Pres­i­dent Barack Obama, speak­ing for the first time about alle­ga­tions that Secret Ser­vice agents hired pros­ti­tutes, said Sun­day that “of course I’ll be angry” if those accu­sa­tions are proven true by an investigation.

Obama said the agents rep­re­sent the United States and are sup­posed to con­duct them­selves with the high­est lev­els of dig­nity any­where in the world. “Obvi­ously, what’s been reported doesn’t match up to those stan­dards,” Obama said in a news con­fer­ence wrap­ping his appear­ance at a Latin Amer­ica summit.

The pres­i­dent never directly men­tioned that the spe­cific accu­sa­tions, con­firmed by media out­lets, that agents were cavort­ing with pros­ti­tutes before the pres­i­dent arrived in Colombia.

The Secret Ser­vice sent 11 agents home and placed them on leave for mis­con­duct as the agency reviews what happened.

“I expect that inves­ti­ga­tion to be thor­ough, and I expect it to be rig­or­ous,” Obama said. “If it turns out that some of the alle­ga­tions that have been made in the press are con­firmed, then of course I’ll be angry. … We are rep­re­sent­ing the peo­ple of the United States, and when we travel to another coun­try, I expect us to observe the high­est standards.”

The unseemly topic dogged Obama to the end in Colom­bia, where he fought to keep a focus on America’s trade rela­tions with part­ners through­out the Amer­i­cas. And it is likely to fol­low him back to the United States as law­mak­ers in the Republican-led House con­sider whether to hold hearings.

When Obama took a ques­tion about the topic, he was stand­ing next to Colom­bian Pres­i­dent Juan Manuel Santos.

Obama made tried to put the con­tro­versy in con­text by laud­ing the agents who pro­tect his life.

“These men and women per­form extra­or­di­nary ser­vice on a day-to-day basis pro­tect­ing me, my fam­ily, U.S. offi­cials,” Obama said. “They do very hard work under stress­ful cir­cum­stances and almost invari­ably do an out­stand­ing job. So I’m very grateful.”

He said he would reserve judg­ment until the inves­ti­ga­tion is done.

Five U.S. mil­i­tary ser­vice mem­bers were also alleged to have been involved in the incident.

The Secret Ser­vice agents at the cen­ter of the alle­ga­tions had stayed at Cartagena’s five-star Hotel Caribe. The 11 employ­ees in ques­tion were spe­cial agents and Uni­formed Divi­sion Offi­cers. None were assigned to directly pro­tect Obama.

The scan­dal prob­a­bly is not an iso­lated inci­dent, a lead­ing House Repub­li­can said Sunday.

Cal­i­for­nia Rep. Dar­rell Issa, chair­man of a House inves­tiga­tive panel, said he wasn’t cer­tain whether Con­gress would hold hear­ings on the mis­con­duct. But law­mak­ers will be look­ing “over the shoul­der” of the Secret Ser­vice, he said, to make sure that the agency’s meth­ods for train­ing and screen­ing agents aren’t endan­ger­ing the nation’s VIPs.

“Things like this don’t hap­pen once if they didn’t hap­pen before,” said Issa, who leads the House Over­sight and Gov­ern­ment Reform Committee.

Appear­ing Sun­day on CBS’ “Face the Nation,” Issa said: “It’s not about whether the pres­i­dent was in dan­ger this time. It’s whether or not you need to make changes so the Amer­i­can peo­ple can have con­fi­dence in all of their workforce.”

Posted by AP News on Apr 15 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.