Recent Secret Service Story Questioned

According to Politico, Carol Leonnig's recent Washington Post story about two U.S. Secret Service agents drunkenly running a car into White House barricades and over a suspicious package may not be as dramatic as was initially reported.

Surveillance video of the Secret Service’s latest scandal shows that on March 4 the two agents were driving “at a very low rate of speed onto the White House complex," according to testimony from new Secret Service Director Joseph Clancy. One source told The Huffington Post the speed was “perhaps just 1 to 2 mph." According to a tweet from Chad Pergram of Fox News, the network was told the agents backed their car up at the White House and "‘nudged’ [a] barrel to side of car with nose of car. Barrel did not tip over. Incident took 30 secs.” Law enforcement officials told CNN a similar, less sensational account of the incident.

In Leonnig's version of events, published March 12, the two agents had just left a party, ran into a barricade and “may have driven over” a package that was a part of an active bomb investigation. After conflicting accounts reported that the agents did not drive over the package, the Post changed the language from “may have driven directly over” to “drove directly beside,” according to NewsDiffs.

The report marks the fourth time Leonnig's reporting on the Secret Service has been called into question. Leonnig is also responsible for wrongly reporting that a convicted felon rode in an elevator with President Obama, for reporting that a few-days-long Secret Service operation lasted months, and for using a dubious source on allegations that Secret Service members solicited prostitutes.