The Secret Service has a 'bad track record' in complying with investigations

On MSNBC Friday, Carol Leonnig of The Washington Post explained the background behind the new accusations against the Secret Service.

The agency is accused by the office of the inspector general of deleting phone records pertaining to the January 6 Capitol attack — an accusation they vehemently deny happened on purpose.

"You are just about to, I guess, comment on it because the inspector general has made it pretty clear that he feels the Secret Service isn't being very cooperative," said anchor Ayman Mohyeldin. "Is that surprising to you, given the extensive reporting on the agency which is how, generally, are they a forthcoming agency with a type of information, given the access that they have to the Oval Office and the president?"

"Such a perfect question, well-framed. Because 4000 percent, the answer is no," said Loennig. "They are generally loathe to turn up records. They have been accused, in the past, of destroying records, of obstructing a congressional investigation. That's a long time going back now, in the 1980s, a congressional investigative team was trying to understand how much the Secret Service had been warned ahead of time about assassination attempts, including the attempt that took the life of John F. Kennedy — critical documents were essentially destroyed, weeks or days after investigators sought them."

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According to Leonnig, this may not necessarily indicate a crime has occurred — but it is part of a worrying pattern of how the Secret Service operates.

"The Secret Service, I think, has a pretty decent fact-based way to say, we didn't in this case, intentionally delete information that an investigator was seeking," said Loennig. "The problem is, they don't have a great track record in complying or participating in their oversight investigations. They just don't like it. They have tried to block investigators — a criminal investigator, special counsel, from investigating what they knew about Bill Clinton's extramarital activities with an intern. They were loath to talk about that. So, they're not in a good position to say, no, no, no, no, we would never do that. But that's not true. They have done that before. In this case, though, the basic problem is, they may not have intentionally deleted anything, but they didn't take the right steps, the correct steps to preserve basic government documents, which all federal employees are trained and how to do. And that's not something the Secret Service routinely required of its personnel."

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