A US government investigation today criticized a bizarre Secret Service assignment that pulled agents from their duty near the White House and sent them to the rural home of a headquarters employee embroiled in a personal dispute with a neighbor.
The conduct amounted to a "serious lapse in judgment," the inspector general of the Homeland Security Department, John Roth, said in a statement accompanying an investigative memo he released.
"These agents, who were there to protect the president and the White House, were improperly diverted for an impermissible purpose."
The statement comes as Congress is investigating the Secret Service over a series of security breaches and scandals, including a recent incident where a man with a knife scaled the White House fence and dashed all the way into the East Room.
Although agency officials insisted President Barack Obama's safety was not compromised, the report notes Obama was at the White House on at least two days that the agents were "a 50-minute drive (without traffic) from the White House" checking on the headquarters employee.
It found no legal justification for using Secret Service agents for such a purpose.
"The Secret Service's mission is to protect the president of the United States, and not to involve itself in an employee's purely private dispute best handled by the local police," Roth said.
A Secret Service spokesman, Ed Donovan, said in a statement, "The Secret Service has received the OIG memorandum and is reviewing it for findings."
Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said that he'd asked Joe Clancy, the acting director of the Secret Service, which is part of DHS, to "take any appropriate disciplinary action that he deems necessary and report back to me."
Compared to that failure and other incidents, including a prostitution scandal in Colombia, "Operation Moonlight" stands as a strange side note. It happened three years ago but came to light this past May in a report in The Washington Post.
A Secret Service employee who worked as the assistant to then-director Mark Sullivan was involved in a dispute with her neighbor, who was harassing her and assaulted her father. This "resulted in the loss of several of her father's teeth," the report says.
Local police arrested the neighbor, and the employee, identified by the Post as Lisa Chopey, sought out a protective order.
