Secret Service Tries To Distract From Lies About Jan 6 With Lies About Kamala Motorcade Accident

Keep digging, fellas!

What the entire fuck is going on over at the Secret Service? Last night the Washington Post revealed that the agent driving Vice President Kamala Harris's SUV on Monday hit a curb in a tunnel near Foggy Bottom and damaged the tire. Harris was transferred to another vehicle and returned to the White House without incident. But not for the first time, the Service appears to have turned a minor embarrassment into a major headache by trying to cover it up.

Because instead of copping to what they'd done, the agents radioed back that the car had had a “a mechanical failure," a preposterous lie in light of the fact that a motorcade of dozens of people had just witnessed the accident. Of freaking course the truth got back to Secret Service Director Kim Cheatle almost immediately, and then to the Post's Carol Leonnig, who literally wrote the book on the Secret Service. There was no universe in which these doofuses were going to be able to cover this up, and yet, that's exactly what they tried to do.

“During a protective movement Monday, a vehicle in a motorcade had a minor overcorrection and struck a curb,” Secret Service spokesman Anthony Guglielmi told the Post . “The protectee was transferred to a secondary vehicle, and the motorcade continued to its destination. There were no injuries to anyone.”

He went on to imply that the whole thing was just a misunderstanding, appearing to blame garbled messaging on the encrypted messaging channel the Service uses for communications.

“Initial radio traffic indicated this was a mechanical failure, and that was communicated to agency leadership by personnel supporting the motorcade movement,” Guglielmi continued. “After the protective movement was completed, leadership was verbally updated with additional pertinent facts that the vehicle struck a curb.”

Mistakes, as it were, may have been made. By radio traffic, which is known to have a mind of its own.

As Leonnig points out, "The Secret Service has had a long, troubled history of covering up its own mistakes and misconduct, with the most senior leaders and managers often relying on the shroud of secrecy covering presidential security to cover up agency foibles and failures."

Which is a pretty diplomatic way of putting it, since the Service is smack in the middle of a major national security scandal, having more or less immediately deleted text messages from January 6, 2021, and then hidden the fact long enough that they were unlikely to be forensically retrieved. There's also that awkward time in 2014, when the Service claimed that an unarmed fence jumper had been intercepted before breaching the White House, when in fact the armed man got deep inside the building . Or the time in 2012 when agents hired prostitutes on a presidential trip to Colombia. Or the time in 2011 where a gunman fired an automatic weapon at the White House in an attempt to assassinate Barack Obama, and the Service blamed gang members .

Boy, that radio traffic really needs to get its shit together! Also, too, the Secret Service.

[ WaPo ]

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