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View Full Version : Dallas woman discovers new Secret Service sex scandals through public information requests




Suzanimal
08-05-2016, 01:56 PM
"A lot of people think I'm nuts to pursue this."

The speaker is a self-described Dallas stay-at-home mom who spent $100,000 in legal fees to expose a culture of corruption in the U.S. Secret Service.

She filed 89 Freedom of Information Acts (89!) and discovered enough Secret Service scandals and cover-ups that even Bob Woodward would be impressed.

For this, she got very little public attention. Until now.

Meet Malia Litman. A retired lawyer and wife of noted Internet entrepreneur David Litman, founder of hotels.com and now CEO of getaroom.com.

She sits at her table in her North Dallas mansion during The Watchdog team visit.

Hors d'oeuvres were set out before we arrive — something my colleague Marina Trahan Martinez and I are not used to — cucumber slices, cookies, carrots, celery, hummus and pita bread. Her story is so riveting, we don't touch the food.

When the first Secret Service sex scandals broke a few years ago, she grew curious. A former senior partner at Thompson & Knight law firm in Dallas, she knew that federal law allows us to see government documents.

She began filing requests with the U.S. Department Homeland Security to learn of any incidents of agent misbehavior in the Secret Service, any investigations and disciplinary action.

I'll skip ahead to the end of her multi-year legal battle that ensued. She won. In the end, she received 3,914 pages, some of them so hot they almost burn the fingers.

Watch our video on Malia Litman. (at link)

My colleague Marina spent the week analyzing the documents and pulled out vignettes which are shared with this story. Here, though, are lowlights of behind-the-scenes mishaps of our vaunted Secret Service.

A culture of "wheels up; rings off" meant even married agents could party on foreign trips.

Secret Service K-9 units brought their dogs into their hotel room, which the dogs trashed. The agents made payoffs so the incident wouldn't be reported.

A agent who missed his flight later showed up drunk with two prostitutes. He was not disciplined.

Agents "engaged" with prostitutes in Amsterdam's red-light district during an advance team trip.

A supervisor choked a female subordinate because she rejected his sexual advances.

A supervisor offered a subordinate a larger office in return for sex.

A supervisor took a subordinate to a sex show while on duty.

A male agent's gun was stolen by a male prostitute he solicited online. The gun was never recovered.

A manager in the National Threat Assessment Center forced employees to drink alcohol in his office "so that he could trust them." The same manager was accused of multiple incidents of sexual harassment.

...

http://www.dallasnews.com/investigations/watchdog/20160805-watchdog-dallas-woman-discovers-new-secret-service-sex-scandals-through-public-information-requests.ece

phill4paul
08-05-2016, 02:36 PM
A culture of "wheels up; rings off" meant even married agents could party on foreign trips.

Send the documents to every married S.S. agents wife. The reaming they would get from them would be worse than anything the government would/could do.