White House agents pulled from 2011 patrols to protect fellow staff, report shows

WASHINGTON – Members of a Secret Service special unit responsible for patrolling near the White House were pulled off that assignment over at least two months in 2011 to protect the assistant of the agency’s director while she was engaged in a dispute with a neighbor, according to a report in the Washington Post.

Agents were told that the Secret Service director at the time, Mark Sullivan, was concerned that his assistant was being harassed by her neighbor, the Post reported in a story posted Saturday night on its website.

The agents were pulled from a surveillance team that patrols the outskirts of the White House compound and monitors the southern side of the executive mansion whenever crowds gather to watch the president and first family travel via motorcade or helicopter, the Post reported.

Agents inside the Washington field office were concerned that the diversion of agents increased security risks to the compound and the president, two people familiar with the discussion told the newspaper. A spokesman for the agency told the Post that the agents involved were not part of the president’s protective detail and therefore the operation had no impact on it.

Sullivan left the Secret Service in 2013 nearly a year after a scandal involving members of the presidential protection team hiring prostitutes ahead of a trip by President Barack Obama to Colombia in 2012. In a statement to the Post, Sullivan said a supervisor in his office authorized the visits to the assistant’s home without his knowledge, that they lasted only a few days and that they were appropriate given the report of threats to an employee.

Called “Operation Moonlight” within the agency, the assignment that summer of 2011 called for two agents twice a day, in the morning and at night, to monitor the home of his assistant, the Post reported. The residence was in rural area outside the Maryland town of La Plata, nearly an hour’s drive from Washington.