Zero fail, p.47
Zero Fail, page 47
Though Connolly had overall responsibility for security at the White House complex, neither he nor Ogilvie had been paying attention to their government BlackBerrys. A little before 10:30 p.m., the White House had moved to the heightened security of Condition Yellow, indicating that personnel should be alert for potential danger and triggering the closure of the E Street entrance on Fifteenth Street. As Ogilvie was paying the bar tab fifteen minutes later, the JOC had put out an email alert to all supervisors—and called Director Clancy at home—to explain that the White House had gone to Condition Yellow because a woman had thrown a suspicious package near the guardhouse at the E Street entrance and yelled “Bomb.” The local police bomb detonation team had been summoned to determine whether it was a real explosive or a false alarm. To protect their own officers and the public, the Secret Service vacated the entrance, using barrel cones to block it, and then stationed officers farther north on Fifteenth Street to reroute traffic away from this two-block section closest to the package.
Oblivious to the drama, Ogilvie was heading straight for the E Street entrance to the White House grounds. A Secret Service officer rerouting cars on Fifteenth Street tried to wave Ogilvie’s car to a stop, but Ogilvie blew past him. The supervisor continued driving his car toward the now vacated guardhouse. There, Ogilvie had to make a wide turn to try to go around a large plastic traffic barrel. He backed up and drove forward twice to get a better angle to pass, but he eventually gave up and slowly used his right front fender and the passenger side of his car to shove the barrel out of his way. As his car entered the area of the White House grounds that had been evacuated for a bomb investigation, Ogilvie’s driver side tires rolled within a few feet of the mystery package. Like all cars entering the White House grounds, he now had to wait for officers to screen his vehicle before they would lower a retractable metal barrier and allow him to drive farther onto the complex.
A supervisor at the JOC watching Ogilvie’s SUV enter the locked-down E Street entrance on live surveillance video radioed to Uniformed Division officers to go check on the agents parked near the retractable barrier. The officers were somewhat uncomfortable, not wanting to get closer to a possible bomb until it had been inspected, but all three complied and walked up to the car. Ogilvie and Connolly lifted their Secret Service badges as the men approached.
“How’d you get in here?” the lead officer asked the agents.
The agents were silent. The officer asked Ogilvie and Connolly two more times, again getting no answer, as if the agents were playing a game. Ogilvie kept his head pressed hard to the back of his seat, with his eyes wide, as if trying not to blink. Connolly, in the passenger seat, looked glassy-eyed and disheveled and said nothing. Ogilvie eventually replied when the officer asked a fourth time.
“No one stopped us,” he said. Ogilvie lied and said they were coming from headquarters. In fact, they’d been drinking in a bar for the last five hours. “Where are the post officers and the K-9?” Connolly wanted to know, appearing to be upset that they weren’t being cleared to drive on past the barrier. The officers explained: This entrance was closed due to a suspicious package.
It was a few minutes after 11 p.m., and several emails had already been sent to Connolly and other supervisors about the package and heightened security at the White House. Connolly, the man in charge of overall White House security, had no idea about it. Instead, he and his drinking buddy had driven into an area that had been shut down due to the risk of a possible bomb blast.
The officers suspected the agents had been drinking because they weren’t making any sense. One of the three officers decided to call the watch commander, Capt. Michael Braun, the highest-ranking officer on the grounds that night. “We have a situation,” the officer told Braun. “We have Connolly and Ogilvie down here. They could be drunk.”
Captain Braun, who ultimately answered to Connolly but was several rungs below him in the chain of command, called his boss. He wanted to confer about a problem he and fellow Secret Service officers had never encountered before: a likely inebriated and upset supervisor of the president’s detail who had ridden back to the White House in a government car driven by another agent who might also be drunk, through a roadblock and into an active investigation scene. After the call, Braun came down to the entrance to eyeball the situation for himself and told the three officers to stand down. Reaching Ogilvie’s SUV, Braun smelled a faint odor of booze. He noticed Connolly had a flushed face and glazed-over eyes and had his cellphone pressed to his ear.
“Have you guys been drinking?” Braun asked Ogilvie.
“What?” Ogilvie said.
Braun asked again. Ogilvie turned in Connolly’s direction, then nodded slowly and said “Yes” in a low voice.
The captain took his next step with limited information. He concluded that Ogilvie seemed calm and professional and was fit to drive, but Connolly was not. He summoned the K-9 team, which initially refused to enter the area and then relented, to come screen Ogilvie’s SUV so they could let Ogilvie pass the retractable barrier. Fellow officers said Braun told them he believed both men were “hammered” and violating the Service’s ten-hour rule, which prohibited agents from drinking within ten hours before reporting for duty. Some of the officers had wanted to perform a sobriety test on the agents, but Braun explained that that would be a “career killer.” The officers understood that he was talking about his career, not Connolly’s. Braun later denied making those comments.
There was no disputing, though, that the high-ranking agents’ bizarre entry onto White House grounds represented a three-alarm fire for the Secret Service Uniformed Division. The officers had called Braun for help, Braun had called his boss for advice, and Braun’s boss now called his supervisor, Deputy Chief Alfonso Dyson, to alert him to the scene on the White House’s east side. Dyson oversaw all officers at the White House, and after getting a quick briefing, he called Connolly at about 11:19 p.m., moments after Ogilvie had dropped Connolly at his own government car. Dyson normally reported to Connolly, but that night Connolly was the one needing Dyson’s counsel.
“I fucked up,” Connolly told the chief.
Dyson twice urged Connolly to report this to his boss “before things get out of hand.” Connolly agreed that he would. Both Ogilvie and Connolly drove to their respective homes, despite Braun’s belief that Connolly was probably impaired. Neither reported the events of March 4.
But karma came back to haunt the pair of powerful agents. At least one of the officers working that rainy night when Ogilvie and Connolly showed up looking plastered had themselves been busted and demoted just a year earlier after an alcohol-fueled night out in the Florida Keys. That previous March, a 1 a.m. crash in Islamorada that involved two Secret Service officers prompted a deep-dive internal investigation. It revealed many of the officers on the trip had hit the local sports bar hard that night for shots of tequila. A supervisor ended up having to drag the men out of the bar, and at least one vomited all over their rented van. They were technically on duty at the time and supposed to be preparing to receive the Obama family for a few days of vacation early the next morning. Director Julia Pierson had stripped several of the officers of plum specialist assignments and bucked them back to post-standing duty at the White House as a result. Now, a year later, the officers of Florida Keys fame weren’t going to let two senior agents in the Secret Service get away with such a brazen, drunken escapade.
An officer created a secret email account that Friday, March 6, and wrote a description of the incident that he and his colleagues rapidly forwarded from friend to friend in the Secret Service family. One version simply said two unnamed agents were suspected of driving drunk back to the White House, being involved in some kind of car crash, and blundering their way into an area cleared due to a suspicious package. A former agent caught wind of the incident and called me that Friday to find out if I had heard what happened after Donovan’s retirement party. Over the weekend, many dozens of current and former Secret Service agents had shared and forwarded the email.
Retired agent Mike Novak, a longtime friend of Clancy’s, was worried when another alum alerted him to the allegation and how widely it had been shared. Hundreds of current and former agents knew all the gory details, but one critical person absolutely did not: Joe Clancy. Novak, who had overlapped with Clancy when they worked at Comcast, wanted to protect his friend from embarrassment. Clancy was just one month into his role as permanent director. Novak called Clancy at about nine o’clock on Monday morning, March 9, at headquarters to clue him in.
Clancy listened and thanked Novak. He felt sure this had to be a bogus story, but he called Billy Callahan, the deputy director of protective operations, to ask him to check into it. Nobody had mentioned this incident in Clancy’s morning briefings the previous week. Despite Dyson’s reminding Connolly to report the incident to his boss, Obama detail chief Rob Buster, Connolly had done and said nothing, even when he and Buster met two days later to discuss the failure to immediately apprehend the suspicious package suspect. By midmorning Monday, Richard Coughlin, the deputy assistant director then overseeing the Office of Professional Responsibility, met with Clancy to alert him to the detailed story making the rounds over the weekend. This one shocked the director because it named the two agents. Clancy had worked closely with Connolly and supervised him on the detail. Both he and Ogilvie were highly experienced supervisors. The director felt he couldn’t properly investigate this internally, based on Secret Service policy. He told Coughlin to notify the office of the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general, John Roth, and ask him to take over the investigation that night.
Two days later, I published a story breaking the news that Connolly and Ogilvie were being investigated based on allegations they had been intoxicated and involved in a possible car accident and had either crashed or bumped into a White House security barrier.
Many details weren’t yet confirmed. I stuck to what I knew: the specific allegations that Clancy had received and that he wanted investigated—a possible “crash” involving two agents, allegedly drunk, as described in the mystery email:
The Obama administration is investigating allegations that two senior Secret Service agents, including a top member of the president’s protective detail, drove a government car into White House security barricades after drinking at a late-night party last week, an agency official said Wednesday.
But other news outlets reported a crash as a fact, not an allegation that Clancy wanted run to ground:
Two senior Secret Service agents, including a top member of President Barack Obama’s protective detail, crashed a car into a White House barricade following a late-night party for retiring spokesman Ed Donovan and it’s suspected they had been drinking, sources confirmed to CNN.
When the story published, though, the instant reaction among even hardened Secret Service alums was disgust.
“Hi, Carol,” former CAT supervisor Dan Emmett wrote me.
I am sad, angry and essentially incredulous. After everything that the Service has gone through over the past three years this defies the imagination. The Service had the chance to rebuild its reputation with the American people but have, in all probability, set back the rebuilding process back by years. The public is fed up as well as the good agents who are forced to put up with this type of reckless, irresponsible lack of leadership.
Joe Clancy did the right thing by referring this to OIG/DHS and I am certain it will be an extremely thorough investigation. If Ogilvie and Connolly did what they are alleged to have done, they are done. If true, this is the height of irresponsibility, incompetence and total disregard for the Secret Service and the office of the Presidency.
At the White House, the reaction was barely concealed revulsion. Senior Obama aides there were sick of playing clean-up for the Secret Service’s debacles. This misconduct had taken place on the White House grounds and implicated one of the president’s highest-ranking protectors.
“I’m aware of those reports,” White House press secretary Josh Earnest told reporters who asked about the incident at the press briefing the next day. “The allegations included in them are disgusting.” Earnest said the administration and the Secret Service took the reports “very seriously” and then tersely referred additional questions to the Secret Service press office.
Clancy took a series of beatings on Capitol Hill over the March 4 incident, as his mid-March hearings on the Secret Service budget turned into inquisitions about Secret Service screw-ups. House Appropriations Committee chairman Hal Rogers scolded the new director at a hearing for his head-in-the-sand approach to the two agents’ alleged drunk driving. “To say you’re not investigating because you want the inspector general to investigate is hogwash,” Rogers said. He also questioned Clancy’s ability to change the Secret Service’s arrogant, above-the-rules culture. “I don’t sense at this moment that you have the determination to make that happen,” Rogers said.
The quiet, always polite, and somewhat robotic Clancy began to resemble a tattered rag doll, though, as members took turns flaying him at a March 24 congressional hearing. Two of the Secret Service’s strictest overseers—Representatives Jason Chaffetz and Elijah Cummings, the chairman and ranking member of the House Oversight Committee—had called the hearing, aghast at what had happened. But their outrage ratcheted higher after Clancy told them before the hearing that he couldn’t provide key details about the incident and he wouldn’t let his senior deputies answer the committee’s questions.
“By refusing to allow the witnesses we invited to testify—with firsthand knowledge of the incident—Director Clancy is keeping Congress and the American public in the dark,” Chaffetz said. “It is unclear why Director Clancy is choosing at the start of his tenure to be so unhelpful to Congress.”
Democrats, the White House’s natural defenders, didn’t show Clancy any mercy either. Behind closed doors, Cummings told Clancy he couldn’t take much more of the “merry-go-round” of misconduct at his agency. From the dais, he warned Clancy that the anonymous officers who created the email about the March 4 incident apparently didn’t trust him to punish the agents involved, and others had disrespected him by leaving him in the dark about a brewing scandal. He said President Obama’s life was in danger thanks to “an agency at war with itself.” “I believe when the chain of command is broken, there is no command,” Cummings said. “It’s like a body without a head, and where there is no command, there is vulnerability and the vulnerability goes to the safety of the president of the United States.”
Several lawmakers expressed shock upon learning that Clancy refused to share videotape of the incident with members, and that much of it had been essentially destroyed, overwritten rather than preserved. “I’m a little bit more than troubled by the willful ignorance here,” Massachusetts Democratic representative Stephen Lynch said. “You don’t ask questions and then you destroy evidence.” At headquarters, employees seethed as they watched Chaffetz bash the polite, even docile Clancy, repeatedly interrupting and berating him before the television audience. The anger fueled an organic rebellion. Aneda Arriaga, a supervisor in administration, watched Clancy’s testimony on her office TV, like many supervisors in headquarters. Just eighteen minutes into the hearing, a curious Arriaga opened the Secret Service’s confidential “Master Cases Index” on her desktop computer and typed the name Chaffetz. A tiny file popped up for the current Oversight Committee chairman. It showed that Chaffetz had applied to become a Secret Service agent in 2003 in a western field office and been rejected. According to the record, the Service never interviewed Chaffetz and chose a “better qualified applicant” for the slot, a rejection known in the Service as “getting BQA’d.”
The information was stored in a restricted Secret Service database and protected by law as private personnel information.
The news of Chaffetz’s rejection spread quickly. Before lunchtime, Cynthia Wofford, a deputy assistant director over the Intelligence Division, heard about Chaffetz’s application from co-workers. An agent in the Dallas office that evening looked up Chaffetz in MCI and emailed Clancy’s chief of staff, Mike Biermann, asking him to call about “some information.” By the end of that Tuesday, seven people had searched the Chaffetz file. By the end of the next day, Wednesday, thirteen more had accessed his records.
Midmorning on Wednesday, Wofford had stopped into the office of Clancy’s deputy director Craig Magaw to share what she knew, but he shooed her away with his hand.
“Yeah, yeah, we know,” Magaw said.
Clancy and Magaw were both scheduled to attend an important luncheon that afternoon: Clancy was hosting former directors of the Secret Service to get their advice on the agency’s challenges. Before they went to the lunch, Magaw told Clancy about Chaffetz’s rejected application. In a sign of how effectively the Service spread gossip, two of the former directors had already heard about Chaffetz’s failed application for an agent job in 2003 from other retired agents. Different people remembered the particulars of who said what differently, but all remembered the Chaffetz matter coming up and Clancy acknowledging it. Former director Lew Merletti said he brought up Chaffetz’s history with the Service at the lunch. Another person remembered former director Brian Stafford asking Clancy about the rumor.
