Julia Pierson Resigns: A 2013 Inspector General Report Detailed All of the Secret Service’s Problems. Nobody Cared.
The Department of Homeland Security’s Inspector General’s Office provided a rare—albeit somewhat redacted—peek inside the Secret Service this past December when it released a report following the agency’s Colombian prostitution scandal the previous year. The report should have raised a giant red flag for anyone paying attention. Instead, it went largely overlooked thanks to its official conclusion that there was nothing to suggest that “misconduct [was] widespread” within the Secret Service.
Dig past the executive summary and you’ll find a huge disconnect between the IG’s conclusion and the evidence that comes before it. The report found that between 2004 and 2012, there had been nearly 800 documented cases of misconduct within the agency, ranging from disruptive behavior to problems with drugs or alcohol. The report doesn’t provide details of the incidents, but 257 of the offenses were classified as “neglect of duty,” a rather broad catchall that includes both the failure to carry out orders on time and the failure to carry them out at all. Other offenses that fall under that category include: “sleeping on the job,” “inattention to duty,” and “negligent or careless performance of assigned duties.”