The First Family Detail Read online

  The Secret Service file contains copies of law enforcement and financial records that agents retrieved, including any arrest records, as part of a background investigation of Mulligan. Given that it was a clandestine assignment outside the lawful authority of the Secret Service, the file was kept separate from the agency’s official records. Instead, it was hidden on a lower shelf of the supervisor’s platform in the operations center on the sixth floor of the Washington field office.

  Unlike the FBI, the Secret Service does not label its cases with names like ABSCAM or UNABOM. But Secret Service agents in the Washington field office were told the clandestine mission to protect Chopey and her father would be unofficially referred to as Operation Moonlight.

  While the file makes no mention of Sullivan, an agent says the orders came from him through supervisors in the field office. Agents would not have responded to such an alarming order on behalf of Sullivan’s assistant unless it had come from the director himself, an agent notes.

  “Sullivan directed agents in the Washington field office to conduct a full background check of this guy when it had nothing to do with the Secret Service,” an agent says. “It’s illegal. You can’t run NCIC [National Crime Information Center], LexisNexis Accurint for Law Enforcement, and discover all of this individual’s financial records, background records, and criminal histories when it doesn’t involve the agency for which you work.”

  Moreover, “agents in the Protective Intelligence Squad knew what they were doing was wrong, and management knew it was wrong,” the agent says. “The agents knew on a daily basis they were doing something that did not involve the Secret Service with taxpayer dollars. They were told not to discuss this outside the squad, that they were going to take care of this themselves on the direction of the director.”

  The agents diverted to check on Chopey were on a team code-named Prowler. Consisting of two agents per shift, Prowler conducts covert surveillance to detect any threats when Marine One lifts off or lands with the president and when Marine Two lifts off or lands with the vice president. Armed with Remington breaching shotguns and Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine guns, as well as their handguns, the agents typically conduct surveillance from an unmarked truck outside the White House or at the vice president’s residence at the Naval Observatory.

  Agents assigned to Prowler were told to leave their posts, drive to Chopey’s home, and sit outside. Depending on traffic, the trip takes one to two hours. If Chopey was at work, they were instructed to call her on her cell phone to ask where she was and then watch over her father until it was time for them to drive back to Washington to end their shifts. If they had any questions, they were to call a high-level supervisor listed in the file.

  Requiring agents to sign their initials to verify that they have gone to a post is highly unusual. “We protect the president and his wife and daughters and do not have to initial that we have performed our duties,” an agent says.

  After five days, the agents stopped signing the log because they recognized that since their activity was unlawful, the document could be used as evidence against them, according to a current agent.

  When Prowler agents were occupied watching Chopey’s house, no other agents were assigned to perform their duties. That left an open door to a potential attack on the president: A sniper or a Stinger missile launched from the perimeter of the White House grounds could have downed Marine One. In fact, the Secret Service had previously received intelligence that a terrorist organization was considering such an attack. Yet an agent says that this possibility seemed not to concern Secret Service management.

  The Prowler team was also diverted from the other duties assigned to it. They include covering the motorcades of the president and vice president as they enter and leave the White House grounds, checking for suspicious persons around the White House, and following up on and investigating threats to the president or vice president. If an attack had occurred, the team would not have been there to help repel it.

  “If you had to cover the president or the vice president, that was secondary,” an agent says. “It was to check on her house. We don’t have any authority in Maryland. If something happened, we couldn’t do anything anyway.”

  The Secret Service file shows that as instructed, on July 1, Secret Service agents conducted a complete background investigation of Mulligan that included retrieving confidential information from the FBI’s National Crime Information Center (NCIC) and LexisNexis Accurint for Law Enforcement. Printouts of the responses in the Secret Service file are dated the same day.

  The retrieved reports plainly show that the Secret Service requested them, and two of the reports list the name of the Secret Service agent who ordered the records. They show Mulligan’s Social Security number, date of birth, prior residences, photos of him, personal details of his life, and any arrest records.

  The Secret Service file also includes an agency employee printout on Chopey. It shows a photo of the attractive woman, her cell phone number, her GS-13 federal salary level, and the fact that her position was staff assistant in the Office of the Director. She began working for the Secret Service in June 1993.

  Federal law makes it a crime to threaten or retaliate against a federal law enforcement officer while he or she is performing official duties. But beyond this limited set of circumstances, neither the Secret Service nor the FBI has authority to respond if a support employee such as Chopey, who is not a law enforcement officer and was not performing official duties, encounters a problem requiring police assistance.

  Law enforcement officers are periodically fired and prosecuted for obtaining confidential records for their personal use or for misusing agency resources. In 2008, FBI supervisory agent Mark Rossini pleaded guilty to searching FBI records on behalf of his girlfriend. In 1993, President Clinton dismissed FBI director William S. Sessions over his use of the FBI for enhancements to his home and other personal abuses disclosed in my book The FBI: Inside the World’s Most Powerful Law Enforcement Agency.

  “Mark Sullivan has come up through the career ranks,” says John L. Martin, who headed the Justice Department’s counterespionage section for nearly twenty-five years and supervised the prosecution of seventy-six spies. “He of all people should know better than to misuse his official position for personal reasons. That is a crime, as is obtaining law enforcement or financial information for personal reasons.” Martin says it is now up to the FBI to launch a criminal investigation.

  Asked for comment, Secret Service spokesman Edwin Donovan said that as a result of an assault on Lisa Chopey’s father and the subsequent harassment of Chopey herself, a “Washington field office patrol vehicle, which is assigned to the Washington field office, made a handful of checks over the following weekend.” Donovan added, “Any suggestion that assets were drawn away from other assignments or that it lasted more than several days is false.” He said, “This was not a ‘secret’ operation as described by these unnamed sources, but a rather mundane security check that many employees were aware of as it was ongoing.”

  After being given a copy of the Secret Service file, Donovan did not cite any legal authority that would give the Secret Service the right to provide protection to its own employees or to check the criminal backgrounds of anyone who may have harassed them. Nor, when asked for comment, did Donovan deny that Sullivan ordered the mission or that he violated criminal laws in doing so. Instead, Donovan said, “The Secret Service conducts hundreds of thousands of NCIC checks each year and is regularly audited by the Criminal Justice Information Service Advisory Policy Board.”

  Sullivan, who resigned as director in February 2013, did not respond to a voice mail in October 2012 seeking comment. Chopey declined to comment.

  In May 2014, the Washington Post ran a story disclosing the existence of Operation Moonlight, but the story was not based on access to the Secret Service file and lacked many of the most important details of the operation, including the fact that agents illegally retrieved confidential law-enfor
cement records on Mulligan.

  A spokesman for Sullivan told the Post that the director had had nothing to do with ordering protection for his own assistant. Instead, Sullivan said a supervisor in his office authorized the operation, that he did not learn about it until after it had begun, and that the checks were conducted for only a few days and were “appropriate.” Mulligan told the paper Chopey tried to hurt him with her SUV when he was trying to talk with her about tensions between the families. He said imposing-looking vehicles parked near Chopey’s home for “months.”

  The fact that a man who was director of the Secret Service for seven years could maintain that diverting agents from watching for snipers as President Obama and his family lifted off in Marine One to instead protecting his own assistant at her home was “appropriate” spotlights the supreme arrogance of Secret Service management.

  The Secret Service agents involved in Operation Moonlight were fully aware that they were breaking the law, but they felt that their jobs were on the line, an agent says. The agents “obtained all this information illegally and kept it and were told not to talk about it outside the squad,” an agent says. “They kept records at the duty desk and made agents on every shift initial that they had gone all the way out to southern Maryland to check on the woman’s welfare on the taxpayer dollar.”

  The revelation of this abuse of power is consistent with practices exposed in this book: Secret Service management dishonestly instructing agents to fill out their own physical fitness test scores, rigging law enforcement scenarios presented to members of Congress, padding arrest statistics, ordering agents to ignore basic security procedures such as passing people through magnetometers at events, and instructing agents to let Bradley Cooper’s unscreened vehicle into a secure area where Obama was about to speak.

  Sullivan’s order was a “direct example of the Secret Service management mind-set, showing disregard for how serious our job really is,” an agent says. “Because of a personal agenda to do a personal favor, the director used tax dollars, illegally violated a man’s personal privacy, and endangered the president of the United States.”

  21

  MISSING SUNGLASSES

  Secret Service agents found George W. Bush to be respectful and considerate of them, and few protectees were as loved by agents as Laura Bush. Agents were overjoyed at the contrast with their predecessors, the Clintons. But especially when they were younger, the Bushes’ twin daughters, Jenna and Barbara, gave agents fits.

  “With Bush, there was an instant change,” a former Secret Service agent says. “He was punctual. Clinton was never on time for anything. It was embarrassing. Bush and his wife treated you normally, decently. They had conversations with us. The Clintons were arrogant, standoffish, and paranoid. Everyone got a morale boost with Bush. He was the complete opposite of Clinton.”

  “Bush is down-to-earth, caring,” another agent says. The Bushes offer food to agents. “They are always thinking of people around them.” Compared with the Clintons, the difference “is striking.”

  Under Clinton, the White House operated like an all-night pizza parlor. Aides attended meetings in jeans and T-shirts. As in a college debating society, business was conducted late into the night and all weekend. Clinton threw out ideas and endlessly circled a subject rather than come to a conclusion. He did not hesitate to wake up aides at home with trivial questions. The lobby of the West Wing was like a subway station, packed with visitors coming and going. Carpets and upholstered furniture were fraying, and empty pizza containers were everywhere.

  “Under Clinton, staffers would bring in girls they had picked up in Georgetown to see the Oval Office at midnight,” says a former Secret Service agent. “[George W.] Bush changed that. If a staffer wanted to bring a guest in, he had to make an appointment in advance. There were no more late-night visits to the Oval Office. Bush restored respect.”

  In contrast to first daughter Chelsea Clinton, Jenna and Barbara Bush thought of Secret Service protection as a pain and treated agents as if they were the enemy. When she was attending the University of Texas, Jenna decided to sleep over at a friend’s home in Highland Park, four miles north of downtown Dallas. All night, agents watched over the house, thinking Jenna was there. The next morning, Jenna—code-named Twinkle—told one of the agents that during the previous evening, she had left her sunglasses at Texadelphia, a nearby cheese steak hangout. She said she wanted to try to retrieve them.

  The agent offered to pick them up himself, and he located them at the restaurant. But it was clear that the president’s daughter had bamboozled the detail once again, eluding her agents as they were watching over her friend’s house during the night.

  “Jenna snuck out of the house to go to the restaurant,” the former agent says. “Instead of letting us know where and when she was going, she would just run out and jump in her car and go. It got to the point where instead of staying at a location inside and then preparing the vehicles, agents had to pretty much stay posted up in the cars all day because she wouldn’t provide notice and would just run out.”

  Even though the agents dressed in casual clothes like shorts and jeans, and most people were unaware of their role, both girls resented having Secret Service agents around. Jenna would purposely try to lose her protection by running red lights or by jumping in her car without telling agents where she was going. As a result, the Secret Service had to keep her car under surveillance at the White House so agents could follow her—a complete waste of manpower. Similarly, when Barbara was attending Yale, she would sneak out of her dormitory, eluding her agents.

  “These girls didn’t want protection,” says a former agent who was on their details. “They would try to run from us and hide from us. They’d intentionally try to lose us, wouldn’t tell us where they were going. They’d hop in a car and take off, not notify the detail they were leaving.”

  “The supervisor of her [Jenna’s] detail was scared of her, because they were afraid that she was going to pick up the phone and call Dad,” an agent says.

  In fact, Jenna called her father many times when she wanted the agents to back off. “The president would call the special agent in charge,” the agent says. “The SAIC would call the detail leader, the detail leader would call the guys and say, ‘Hey, you’ve got to back off.’ ”

  “How about us doing our jobs?” an agent said when he was still protecting her. “I mean what if something happens to her? I think she has a hard time grasping how easy it would be to pick her up, throw her in a van, and next thing you know she’s on Al Jazeera. And we’re out there, we’re trying to do the right thing. And I don’t think she understands it. She definitely didn’t respect what we’re out there trying to do for her.”

  “When they were out in California, Jenna and Barbara went skydiving,” a former agent says. “I remember that the first lady called up the detail leader and reamed him out because we had let them go skydiving. But we can’t tell them no, you can’t go skydiving, Mommy and Daddy say no.”

  When agents tried to tell Jenna she could not do something, “she was like, ‘Well, I’m going to do it,’ and the first thing she does is pick up the phone and call Daddy. Then you got to call your boss and say, ‘Listen, she just had a conversation with POTUS,’ and it gets all spun up the chain of command.”

  While Bush was being shortsighted in siding with his daughter over the Secret Service, agents often tend to go along with whatever the president wants without explaining the possible dire security consequences.

  To make matters worse, President Bush would occasionally chew out the detail for not following his daughter. One afternoon at the White House, Jenna snuck out a back exit that leads to the Rose Garden, dodging her detail. Bush saw her leave and called the detail leader to complain that she was not being followed.

  “She stepped up to the plate and said, ‘Daddy, I didn’t tell them where I was going,’ ” an agent says.

  One detail leader found he could give Jenna instructions, and she wo
uld listen.

  “He could call her up on the phone and be like, ‘Jenna, what the hell are you doing?’ They were buddies. They were pals. He was strictly professional, but he knew how to deal with her. He could tell her, ‘Listen, Jenna, you’re killing me. You gotta tell me what’s going on.’ And she respected him, which was great.”

  Still, says another agent, “every day we’d run the risk of losing her. She never told us where she was going. It was rare. Sometimes she’d tell Neil [the detail leader], and Neil would get the scoop of what was going on, and Neil would try hard to get that information.”

  Agents say Jenna’s twin, Barbara—code-named Turquoise—was almost as difficult as Jenna. When Barbara was attending Yale, she would jump in her car with friends and drive to New York, where she would stay overnight, never giving her agents advance warning.

  “Agents learned to pack a bag with clothing, because it became a habit for both Barbara and Jenna to say, ‘I want to go to the airport, I want to fly to New York,’ ” an agent says. “These guys were prepared to work an evening shift, and all of a sudden they’re going with just the clothes on their backs.”

  “One night Barbara just hopped in a car and took off to a bar,” a former agent says. “Didn’t tell the detail, but the countersurveillance units picked her up the best they could and tried to follow her.”

  Explaining his own thinking, an agent who was on Jenna’s detail says, “Instead of calling somebody to complain about us, just tell us what you’re going to do and we’ll make it work. But just work with us, instead of trying to play games with us, making our lives miserable.”

  Determining how to deal with first kids’ questionable behavior is always a challenge. As law enforcement officers, Secret Service agents are obligated to make arrests if they see a crime being committed. But if a protectee engages in a minor offense, agents will either look the other way or simply tell the individual to stop.