VIDEO: Utah’s Jason Chaffetz Grills Secret Service Boss
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WASHINGTON, D.C – March 25, 2015 – Gephardt Daily
Utah’s 3rd District Congressman Jason Chaffetz (R) blew a gasket on Capitol Hill Tuesday morning, grilling Secret Service Director Joseph Clancy on why it took the agency nearly half an hour to respond to a bomb threat in front of the White House back on March 4th.
Chaffetz, Chairman of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee, has been monitoring a string of Secret Service lapses over the course of the last year. When he finally had a chance to question Clancy face-to-face he wasted little time in teeing off on the Secret Service chief.
“This is what is so infuriating,” said Chaffetz. “You’re the director of the Secret Service. It’s almost three weeks after the incident and you don’t know why it takes eleven minutes to pick up the phone and say, ‘Hey, Metro Police Department, we’ve got a problem down here. We need your help. It takes 27 minutes to secure the scene? What if it was a real bomb?”
During the two hour session Chaffetz also showed previously unreleased security camera a video of the March 4th incident, during which two Secret Service agents in a government vehicle can be seen hitting an orange barrel used to mark the location of the suspicious package which triggered the bomb scare incident. Several days after the mishap it was revealed the same agents had spent the evening drinking at a fellow agent’s retirement party.
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Chaffetz also took Director Clancy to task for other gaffes the night of the investigation, including the Secret Service’s failure to find the woman who had dropped the package off while telling guards it was actually a bomb. D.C Metro Police had pulled the woman over shortly after the incident, but were waved off by Secret Service agents. The suspect wasn’t apprehended until three days later.
Representative Chaffetz was joined in the Secret Service director’s broadsiding by Maryland Congressman Elijah Cummings. The ranking committee Democrat told Mr. Clancy, “This is not just another oversight hearing about just another agency. I don’t want anything to happen to Obama – not under my watch.”
