They do a difficult and dangerous job, and Howards was wrong to touch Cheney, but the agents aren’t above the law.

Secret Service: Detailed Look at ’06 Turmoil

The arrest of a man named Steven Howards in June 2006 after he approached Vice President Dick Cheney at a Colorado ski resort and denounced the war in Iraq might have seemed, at the time, no more than a blip on the vice president’s schedule.

But now the blip has become a blowup, with Secret Service agents — under oath in court depositions — accusing one another of unethical and perhaps even illegal conduct in the handling of Mr. Howards’s arrest and the official accounting of it.

The revelations arise from a lawsuit Mr. Howards filed against five Secret Service agents, accusing them of civil rights and free-speech violations. They offer a rare glimpse into the inner workings of the Secret Service, which usually wears the standoffish, plainclothes cool of its mission like a cloak of invisibility.

Changing an agent’s report would have been a federal crime.

“Did you believe that Agent Reichle was telling you in essence, ‘I want you to commit the crime of making false statements in an officially filed Secret Service document?’ ” asked a lawyer for Mr. Howards, David A. Lane.
[…]

“Yes, sir.”



  1. phiend says:

    Anyone surprised ?

  2. Improbus says:

    Asking SS agents to protect and serve a Sith Lord is going above and beyond the call of duty.

  3. Cinaedh says:

    Cops get together all the time to decide what to write in their memo books and their reports, so everyone is on the same page.

    After all, truth is a relative concept and you wouldn’t want to see all the criminals get off in Court because one person saw something slightly different from another person, which is inevitable, if you think about it.

    Why give the scumbag lawyers unnecessary ammunition in every single case, ever tried in a court of law?

    I’m not signed up so I couldn’t read the full NY Times story but I guess in this case, there happened to be a major disagreement on the mythical, objective ‘truth’?

  4. Sying Flaucer says:

    What’s the big deal? the SS are basically cops, and cops lie all the time. The guy should be glad he didn’t tazed and a Rodney King style beating.
    On the other hand Cheney should have sicked the IRS on him ala Clinton.

  5. Matt Garrett says:

    All this over some rude bastard who could’t respectfully just send a letter and just had to make federal case out of it.

    LEAVE THE SECRET SERVICE ALONE. Their job is hard enough.

  6. Jägermeister says:

    You would think that with all the sophisticated technology, they could actually wear earpieces that are not visible.

  7. J says:

    These few do not represent the majority of agents. Every agent I have ever met has been nothing but exemplary in conduct. The ones I have known that were on protective detail had the views of a literary character. That is to say their kind of honor and duty only exist in fiction. They believe in the office not the man. They protect the office not the man. They are not pawns. If this all happened as written I have no doubt they will be weeded out and fired.

  8. billabong says:

    No.6 the guys they don’t want you to see have the little bitty earphones and aren’t dressed like cops.

  9. B. Dog says:

    Maybe they ought to get around to catching whoever shot Kennedy.

  10. groundzero says:

    One day in 1990, I was at an Gov employment fair.
    I got to talking to people at the SS info table.

    All I said was I was reading an interesting book
    and a guy came from behind the table and loudly
    told me to my face that that man is a traitor!!

    This is the 1988 book:
    Confessions of an Ex-secret service agent
    The Marty Venker story
    By George Rush

  11. Cursor_ says:

    What can we expect.

    All law enforcement people think they are above the law. If they don’t they don’t stay long in the business.

    Always remember:

    Neurotics build castles in the sky
    Psychotics live in them
    Sociopaths are castle security as they like the uniforms and badges.

    Cursor_

  12. Dan says:

    Dick’s Guards are A**holes, Cheney came to Casper a few years back, he was there for some fund raiser for the Republican party. Anyway I was walking out of the mall in Casper when this blazer came speeding up and almost hit me and a couple of my friends. I mean we we’re inches away from the thing. The Secret Service guys driving it didn’t even bother acknowledge that we were there. We know they saw us but they just sort of shrugged us off.

    Anyway did you know Cheney is on the Subway Diet, thats where we saw him!


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