The Secret Service sent three agents home from the Netherlands just before President Barack Obama's arrival after one agent was found inebriated in an Amsterdam hotel, the Secret Service said Tuesday, according to The Washington Post.
The three agents were benched for "disciplinary reasons," said Secret Service spokesman Ed Donovan, declining to elaborate, the Post reported. Donovan said the incident was prior to Obama's arrival Monday in the country and did not compromise the president's security in any way.
The incident represents a fresh blemish for an elite agency struggling to rehabilitate its reputation following a high-profile prostitution scandal and other allegations of misconduct, according to the Post.
An inspector general's report in December concluded there was no evidence of widespread misconduct, in line with the service's longstanding assertion that it has no tolerance for inappropriate behavior, the Post reported.
The agents sent home from Amsterdam were placed on administrative leave, according to the Post.
The newspaper said all three were on the Counter Assault Team, which defends the president if he comes under attack, and that one agent was a "team leader," the Post reported.
One agent was discovered highly intoxicated by staff at a hotel, who reported it to the U.S. Embassy, said a person familiar with the situation, who wasn't authorized to discuss the alleged behavior on the record and demanded anonymity, according to the Post.
Obama arrived in the Netherlands early Monday on the first leg of a weeklong, four-country trip, the Post reported. He departed for Brussels on Tuesday night, and there were no known security issues during his stay in the Netherlands.
Before Obama travels anywhere abroad, a slew of Secret Service and other government officials are dispatched in advance to prepare the intense security operation needed to protect the president in unfamiliar territory, according to the Post.
Typically, counter assault teams travel with the president in his motorcade and if he came under fire, the team would be called upon to engage any attackers while the president was hustled to safety, the Post reported.
Stricter rules implemented in the wake of the prostitution scandal in Colombia bar agents from drinking alcohol within 10 hours of starting a shift, according to the Post. It's unclear whether the other two agents were drinking heavily or what time any of them would have been expected to show up for a shift.
The Secret Service's reputation for rowdy, fraternity-like behavior snowballed in April 2012 in the run-up to another Obama foreign trip, this one in the Caribbean resort city of Cartagena, Colombia, where 13 agents and officers were accused of carousing with female foreign nationals at a hotel where they were staying before Obama's arrival, according to the Post.
Seeking to turn a page on that chapter in the service's famed history, Obama last year named veteran Secret Service agent Julia Pierson as the agency's first female director and signaled his desire to change the culture at the male-dominated service, the Post reported.
