On Thursday, the White House dismissed a report about a prostitution scandal back in 2012.
Accusations have been made that members of the White House had implications with the scandal back in April 2012 that was believed to involve only members of the Secret Service and the U.S. military. Dozens of Secret Service and military members spent time at strip clubs and with prostitutes during the scandal in Colombia. The White House denied that its own members had any such involvement in the affairs during the time.
A recent report suggests that the White House had documents that possibly link a member of the White House to the scandal.
According to a report by the Washington Post, the documents included a hotel log that had a prostitute registered in the same hotel room as White House volunteer Jonathan Dach. He was a 25-year-old student at Yale Law School at the time. Earlier this year, Dach began a full time career as a contractor for the White House as a policy adviser in the Office on Global Women’s Issues at the State Department.
Dach has refused interviews from both Washington Post and White House officials since.
The White House continues to stick with its position of innocence. Kathryn Ruemmler, White House counsel at the time, conducted an internal investigation of the issue back in 2012 and claimed to have found no evidence of White House members being involved with the prostitution scandal.
White House spokesman Eric Schultz told reporters today on Air Force One that, “As part of that review, a hotel record of a volunteer with the advance team was provided to the White House. We considered this evidence, and found no other corroborating materials to suggest this volunteer engaged in inappropriate behavior. And in fact, there’s at least one other instance of a similar hotel log falsely implicating a Secret Service agent who was subsequently exonerated. The White House review, which took into account the information received from the Secret Service, concluded that there hadn’t been any misconduct by the White House team -- White House advance team."
The incident back in 2012 resulted in 10 Secret Service members losing their jobs for having been irresponsible and endangering the President’s life by drinking. Secret Service officials are upset at the lack of punishment on the part of the White House and lack of deeper investigation.
However, others argue that the issue is not comparable since Dach was a volunteer and his duties did not directly affect the President’s safety like the duties of the Secret Service.
