The Secret Circus may soon be looking for a new ringmaster. The prostitution scandal involving a dozen Secret Service agents in Cartagena, Colombia, is spreading into a broader burlesque for the agency, furthered by a Washington Post report that tolerance of a frat-house culture has induced some employees to come up with the “Secret Circus” name.
But the ringmaster of this circus, Secret Service Director Mark Sullivan, sees no cause for alarm. On Wednesday, he went before a Senate committee looking into the scandal and announced unequivocally that what happened in Cartagena was a one-of-a-kind event. “Over the last six years, we’ve done 37,000 trips around the world, and we’ve had no situation like this one before,” he said from the witness table. “This is not a cultural issue. This is not a systemic issue with us.”
Not a single member of the panel, Democrat or Republican, accepted Sullivan’s blithe and categorical dismissals. Yet no amount of bipartisan incredulity, and no piece of evidence the senators presented, would budge the ringmaster from his breezy insistence that the Cartagena Dozen were the only clowns in his circus. Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, the ranking Republican on the homeland security panel, asked whether the facts that the agents in Colombia made no attempt to conceal their actions and that supervisors were among the offenders “reinforce the claim that this kind of conduct has been tolerated in the past.” Replied Sullivan: “I just think that between the alcohol and, I don’t know, the environment, these individuals did some really dumb things.”
And, she asked, what about a survey that found that 40 percent of Secret Service personnel wouldn’t necessarily report ethical misconduct? “I don’t know that that presents a problem,” he answered. He also said he was “absolutely” unmoved by a report by The Washington Post’s Carol D. Leonnig and David Nakamura in which punished agents said that they were scapegoats for “an unwritten code that allows what happens on the road to stay there.”