Clean Up The Secret Service?

As someone who has dealt with the Secret Service through
it agents who protect the president, vice president, presidential
candidates, their families, and other high officials of government
for more than 40 years in my role as journalist, I have come to
hold this agency, and those in it, in very high regard.

Scandals involving the Secret Service, most recently and notably
the one that which brought at least 11 agents back from Colombia
after allegations of improper behavior of those agents, have raised
serious questions about the management of the agency in addition
to the obvious questions about the judgment and ethics of the agents
themselves (if they did what is alleged.) However, the allegations are
already serious enough for the preliminary action by the Secret Service
leadership to have replaced the agents in the field.

Pending the results of the investigation, conclusions about the specific
allegations cannot be made. But the recent bad publicity about the
agency does suggest that, at the very least, it's time for President Obama
to replace the Secret Service leadership. He has as much at stake in a
well-run Secret Service as anyone, and the security of not only the
protection of government officials, but the Secret Service's other (and less
well-known) vital tasks dealing with counterfeiting and federal crimes,
demands that the agency's reputation and quality of its management be
restored immediately.

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Copyright (c) by Barry Casselman
All rights reserved.