It was hard enough for the Obama administration to defend a series of embarrassing security breaches at the Secret Service. Now, there are new questions about a pre-election White House cover-up.
The Washington Post, which has dominated coverage of the embattled agency, reported Wednesday night that the White House knew more than it let on about the involvement of a member of the president's advance team in the prostitution scandal that led to punishment or firing of 12 Secret Service officials in 2012.
The paper's investigation found that the Secret Service repeatedly told senior Obama aides that a young White House volunteer, Jonathan Dach, also took a prostitute back to his hotel on the now-infamous trip to Cartagena, Colombia, ahead of an economic summit in April 2012.
White House officials had said at the time that it was only Secret Service and military personnel who engaged with prostitutes on the trip.
In potentially the most damaging fresh detail, the lead investigator with an administration inspector general's office said he was directed to delay a report on the Colombia incident "until after the 2012 election."
And in another odd twist, Dach, then a Yale law student, is now working as a policy adviser in the Office of Global Women's Issues at the State Department. His father, Leslie Dach, is a top Democratic donor and a former Walmart lobbyist who now also works for the Obama administration. The younger Dach denied hiring a prostitute but declined to comment in The Post report.
