The incident became public after one man got into a dispute over payment with a woman on the morning of April 12, drawing the attention of hotel staff and Colombian authorities, who reported the matter to the U.S. Embassy.
The Secret Service recalled its 11 employees and replaced them with another team before Obama arrived April 13. All of the recalled members were placed on administrative leave, and their top-secret security clearances were revoked.
Sen. Chuck Grassley, the senior Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said news of the three agents leaving the Secret Service was a positive development but says more people may have to go.
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The Secret Service announced Wednesday that three of the men were being dismissed from the agency for their involvement. The third man is a junior member of the team who has voluntarily elected to resign, those familiar with the investigation said.
Berger did not answer questions about his clients’ employment status.
“They have a passion for the agency’s mission,” he said. “They’ve both been doing it for over 17 or 18 years, day in and day out, and very well.”
On Thursday, Capitol Hill lawmakers who oversee the Department of Homeland Security — which includes the Secret Service — said they expected more resignations and firings in the case. Rep. Peter T. King (R-N.Y.), chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, said the 11 agents involved in the scandal underwent drug tests and polygraph exams. Agency investigators in Colombia have visited all of the hotels where Secret Service personnel stayed and have interviewed each of the maids who cleaned rooms in the Hotel Caribe, King said.
People who know the two supervisors have described Chaney’s duties in the international programs division as supervising a department that provides support and administrative help to the agency’s foreign offices. Stokes has been described as the assistant special agent in charge of the K-9 training division at the James J. Rowley Training Center in Beltsville.
Attempts to reach both men were unsuccessful. Calls made to Chaney’s home and cellphone and to Stokes’s home were not returned. No one answered the door when a reporter visited Chaney’s home in Northern Virginia. Parked outside was a silver Ford pickup truck, bearing stickers with a colorful outline of Texas, Chaney’s home state, and the mantra “SECEDE.”
A relative of Chaney said she would relay a message to him.
The commitment to the Secret Service runs deep in Chaney’s family. His father, George Washington Chaney, was a Secret Service agent in President John F. Kennedy’s era and knew the agents on his detail when Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas.
The elder Chaney had remarked to friends that he started at the service working “diaper duty,” where he watched President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s children and grandchildren in Gettysburg, Pa., and also met his wife. Later, he traveled to work in Dallas, where he was on President Lyndon B. Johnson’s protective detail. He also served a stint in the service’s El Paso office and then became the agent in charge of personnel in the D.C. headquarters, where he was working when Kennedy was shot.
He retired in 1977 and started a new line of work as a document examiner in Dallas, where he and his wife raised their five children.
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