Pley Club, via Facebook
The aftermath of the U.S. Secret Service’s alleged fun times in Colombia keeps spreading, with new developments suggesting that in addition to the 11 agents already suspended from their duties protecting President Obama, several military officers were part of a group that is accused of soliciting prostitutes while doing scouting work for an international summit last week. And additional details learned today suggest that besides merely paying for sex work, the agents at the center of the scandal openly bragged about their duties.
“We are embarrassed,” Army Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters Tuesday. “We let the boss down.”
Dempsey said that instead of focusing on the Summit of the Americas, which dealt with global security, labor issues and diplomacy with Cuba, among other issues, “nobody is talking about what went down in Colombia other than this incident.”
But there’s still a great deal unfolding about the alleged conduct by the team that arrived in Cartagena a few days before the president. The Washington Post reports that some Secret Service agents have an unofficial motto while on business trips: “Wheels up, rings off.”
Additionally, there are more details about the wild party the agents and military officers apparently threw for themselves. The agents, who were staying at the three-star Hotel Caribe ($151 per night via Kayak), brought back women for $60 a piece from Pley Club, a nearby strip club last Wednesday night.
But it was what happened the next morning that caught the attention of the agents’ hotel, the Post reports:
The following morning, one of the women demanded an additional payment of $170, setting off a dispute with an agent that drew the attention of the hotel, the Cartagena sources said.
And all the while, ABC News reports, the Secret Service agents bragged to their dates about their jobs. “We work for Obama” and “we’re here to protect him,” they said, in apparent disregard for their agency’s supposed emphasis on discretion.
UPDATE, 2 p.m.: Reuters reports that the Secret Service agents involved in this unfolding scandal brought back many as 20 or 21 prostitutes to their hotel. Further more, as Secret Service agents, it’s possible they had in their hotel rooms copies of the president’s schedule, a document generally guarded with secrecy. A source at the agency told Reuters that presidential schedules and other sensitive documents are kept in a separate secured room, but Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.), who chairs the House Homeland Security Committee isn’t totally reassured. On NBC’s Today show, King said it “could have been disastrous” had the prostitutes been in a room with a White House schedule.
