One of the suspended Secret Service agents caught soliciting prostitutes in Colombia told CBS News Thursday he had been "railroaded," denied due process and deserved a hearing on whether he and other agents should get their jobs back.
A 20-year veteran of the Secret Service, Gregory Stokes and 10 other agents invited prostitutes back to their rooms before a presidential visit to Cartagena last April. A loud argument between one of the women and an agent alerted the U.S. Embassy and then broke into a national scandal:
Before the president even arrived in Colombia, all of the agents were sent back to the United States. Mark Sullivan, then-director of the Secret Service, placed them on administrative leave and revoked their security clearances. Six of them, including Stokes, remain suspended without pay indefinitely.
"I was surprised to the the extent to which Sullivan's director's office would go to railroad us," Stokes said.
Asked what that means, Stokes said, "The primary reason for me talking to you here today is to make it clear that we have been denied due process. We were supposed to have had a three-person final adjudication by the Department of Homeland Security. That proceeding has been delayed. In my opinion and the -- in the opinion of other agents in this situation, they are trying to starve us out. They are trying to put us in a sort of limbo in hopes that we'll quit and go away."
In addition to an internal probe by the Secret Service into the matter, Congress pushed the Department of Homeland Security to investigate as well.
Stokes said the Inspector General's investigation omitted facts conveyed by him and other executives at the Secret Service, including leaving out one executive and a volunteer White House staffer who was the son of a "powerful Washington lobbyist" that allegedly solicited prostitutes:
The White House, Secret Service and DHS say those allegations were thoroughly investigated and were unfounded. But Stokes claims at least one investigator thought otherwise. Stokes said, "I even became aware that the lead investigator -- a man of high integrity, in my opinion -- was placed on administrative leave for refusing to redact or omit portions of his original report to the satisfaction of the inspector general."
"So the lead investigator wrote up a report with the facts as he understood them, submitted it and they sent it back and said, 'Change the facts?'" Miller asked.
Stokes replied, "That's my understanding."