Photo by NCinDC

A “serious lapse in judgment” led to Secret Service agents being pulled from White House patrol duty to a rural Maryland home to protect a high-ranking official’s friend, a government investigation concluded.

“These agents, who were there to protect the President and the White House, were improperly diverted for an impermissible purpose,” Inspector General John Roth of the Department of Homeland Security said in a statement. “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.”

As the Washington Post first reported in May, agents were assigned in 2011 to the home of then-Director Mark Sullivan’s assistant, who Sullivan said was being harassed by a neighbor. The members of the Protective Intelligence Unit were sent to La Plata, Md. for five days. On two of those days, President Obama was in the White House.

Operation Moonlight, as it was known, happened just months before the Secret Service botched its reaction after a man shot at the White House. This year, a man with a knife was able to jump a White House fence and enter the building, one of many lapses made public that led Secret Service Director Julia Pierson to resign.