The White House should "come clean" on what officials knew about the involvement of an administration staffer in the Secret Service prostitution scandal in Colombia, Rep. Jason Chaffetz
told "Fox & Friends."
The Washington Post reported on Wednesday that it "remains unclear" whether in 2012, then-25-year-old White House volunteer Jonathan Dach took a prostitute to his hotel room during a trip to Cartagena to prepare for a summit.
Nearly two dozen Secret Service and military personnel who were also involved with prostitutes during the trip ended up reprimanded or losing their jobs over the scandal.
At the time of the incident, then-White House press secretary Jay Carney said there had been "no credible or specific allegations of misconduct by any member of the White House advance team or White House staff."
But new details drawn from government documents and interviews show that senior White House aides were given "information at the time suggesting that a prostitute was an overnight guest" of a member of the presidential advance team, the Post said.
"The White House needs to come clean. There is a White House staffer that was very involved in this," the Utah Republican said Thursday. "There were very credible and very specific allegations that a White House staffer was intimately involved with a prostitute."
The Department of Homeland Security Inspector General's office investigated the matter, and Chaffetz said there was apparently "a misdirection and some cover-up to make sure that story never saw the light of day before the 2012 election."
Chaffetz said he sent a letter to the White House for documents about the incident and received a tweet from press secretary Josh Earnest telling him it was an "old story."
If that was the case, Chaffetz said, in his response to Earnest he said he should not have "any problem sharing with the United States Congress all the information that you have" about the incident.
Chaffetz said three employees in the Inspector General's office were "put on administrative leave because they were asking questions" about the incident. While other employees were reprimanded or lost their jobs, Chaffetz noted that Dach was now working at the State Department.
"Now he's working on global women's issues — the office of Global Women's Issues at the State Department. It really is offensive to the morale of the Secret Service, the men and women who served," he said. "They got reprimanded. They got fired."
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