Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., has asked the Secret Service to turn over a mass of information about the behavior of its agents in the past five years.
The scope of the requests for information indicates that Lieberman plans a wide-ranging probe of the Secret Service, whose agents got into trouble in Cartagena, Colombia, last month with their heavy drinking and hiring of escorts.
As the head of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, Lieberman and the top Republican on the panel, Susan Collins of Maine, have asked Secret Service head Mark Sullivan to answer 15 detailed questions.
Those queries ranged from “Are Secret Service personnel permitted to pay for sex if they are in a locale or country where that activity is not otherwise illegal?” to “What percentage and number of Secret Service personnel and officers are women?”
“We wish to determine whether those events were indicative of a pattern of behavior by agents or officers of the Secret Service, and need to be addressed systemically, or if they instead constituted an isolated incident warranting action only with respect to the individuals involved,” the senators wrote Sullivan in a letter released Tuesday.
Lieberman and Collins also asked for details of all complaints against Secret Service agents since January 1, 2007, that pertained to “inappropriate conduct.”
The senators also want to know the details of agents who have been disciplined and asked if Sullivan is contemplating changing Secret Service policies or its code of conduct.
“We know you share our commitment to getting to the bottom of events that occurred in Cartagena,” the letter from the senators to Sullivan said.
Lieberman and Collins asked Sullivan to provide answers to all the questions by May 14.