The publisher and author of a website that reported that a Secret Service staffer divulged details of President Barack Obama’s schedule to a Mitt Romney staffer in an effort to impress her is now accusing the Secret Service of trying to “discredit” his report.
The publisher, Shawn McCoy, who served as the communications director for Mitt Romney’s campaign in Iowa, reported a week ago that a secret service agent passed along details of Obama’s schedule to a Romney staffer. McCoy’s report also said that on a different occasion the officer gave joy rides in Secret Service cars with lights flashing.
The story was picked up by multiple news outlets, including TPM. A day after the report at McCoy’s Inside Sources, The Washington Examiner‘s Susan Ferrechio reported that the Secret Service was disputing McCoy’s report. The report came after a spate of other stories about Secret Service blunders related to the White House.
“The President’s schedule is not distributed outside a Secret Service Presidential Detail operations office until it’s officially announced by the White House,” the Examiner report quotes a Secret Service official as saying. “A field office-based agent conducting campaign advances would generally not have access to this information.”
McCoy, in a response on Tuesday, said that report was the Secret Service trying to “muddy the waters” about his report.
“I unequivocally stand by what I wrote. Unfortunately, the Secret Service remains in denial—doubling-down on their CYA mentality that was on full display in Julia Pierson’s Congressional testimony,” McCoy wrote. “That attitude apparently continues to permeate the agency. The Secret Service has chosen to attack my credibility rather than looking themselves in the mirror and admitting they have a problem.”
The Secret Service’s response, McCoy added, didn’t quite disprove his report though.
“The Secret Service seems to recognize these were not normal circumstances. In the agency’s statements to Ferrechio, a spokesperson disputes whether or not this leak occurred, but they would not state that it didn’t happen,” McCoy continued. “They leave the door wide open that it may have happened.”
McCoy noted in his response on Tuesday that he reached out to the Secret Service before publishing his article, which did not give the Secret Service agent’s name.
In response to the report, TPM reached out to a number of former staffers from Romney’s 2012 campaign, all of whom said they had not heard anything like McCoy’s story.
