Samstwitch
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Secret Service sex scandal continues to widen
(CBS News) WASHINGTON April 23, 2012 - It's been more than a week since the Secret Service sex scandal in Colombia exploded into public view, and it seems to be growing.
Six of the 12 agents implicated in the scandal are now out of a job, and the investigation is entering its second week amid new revelations about a prostitute being taken to a sensitive location.
"It just gets more troubling," Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., said on CBS' "Face the Nation" Sunday.
Five nights before the president's arrival, a twelfth Secret Service official, who was not previously under investigation, allegedly brought a prostitute to the Hilton Hotel in Cartegena, the hotel where the president later stayed.
White House staffers, the press and the other 21 Secret Service officials and members of the military implicated in the scandal stayed at the Hotel Caribe.
There are now six Secret Service personnel who have left their jobs in the wake of the incident. Four have chosen to resign. The other two are supervisors. David Chaney has retired; Greg Stokes has been fired, but has a chance to appeal.
"The key thing here is not that they were prostitutes," Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., said on NBC's "Meet the Press." "It's the fact that foreign nationals were brought back into a security area on the eve of the trip of the president of the United States goes against everything the Secret Service stands for."
Two senators, including Lieberman, who has oversight of the Secret Service, are asking the White House to make sure no administration staffers on the Colombia trip are involved.
"If anybody at the White House asks for my counsel on this, I would say they ought to be launching their own internal review of all White House personnel," Lieberman said.
For some on Capitol Hill, questions remain about a cultural problem in the Secret Service, where only 11 percent of the agents are women. "I can't help but wonder, if there'd been more women as part of that detail, if this ever would have happened," Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, said on ABC's "This Week" Sunday.
The woman whose complaint about money started all is now being represented by a lawyer, who's offering to negotiate interviews with her for money.
Woodward on Secret Service: Time to fire someone
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The journalist whose reporting helped bring down a president said Monday that someone in a top position at the Secret Service has to lose his job in the wake of a prostitution scandal rocking the agency.
"Somebody was not watching the store. When that happens in government, the people who are in charge have to step in and say, accountability, you're out," Bob Woodward said in an interview with "CBS This Morning."
Woodward, who became famous for his reporting of President Richard Nixon's Watergate scandal in the 1970s, said investigators have to ask who else knew about what was going on and ask if the agency can continue to function in the wake of the revelations under its current leadership. Mark Sullivan has been the director of the agency since 2006.
At least a dozen Secret Service employees are under investigation after reports of misconduct with prostitutes in Colombia ahead of trip there by President Obama earlier this month.
He noted that Robert Gates, who served as Defense Secretary under Presidents Obama and George W. Bush, fired the head of the Army after the Washington Post reported that patients were badly neglected at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington in 2007.
"So, sometimes you just have to step in and say, leadership requires accountability," he said.
Woodward also remembered Nixon aide Charles Colson, who died over the weekend.
Known as Nixon's most aggressive "hatchet man" who once said he would walk over his own grandmother to get Nixon re-elected, Colson went to prison for his attacks on Daniel Ellsberg, the analyst who released the Pentagon Papers in 1971.
"When Colson went to prison, he experienced, I think, a really genuine conversion and devoted himself to prisoners and prison reform. In a way you can't question because you talk to people in the prison reform movement and Chuck Colson is a god," said Woodward.
