Members-Only Article
As we wait to hear more about the arrest of two men trying to infiltrate the Secret Service there’s one part of the story I want to highlight. Multiple U.S. Secret Service officers accepted free apartments for roughly a year from one of the accused men, Arian Taherzadeh. The value of these gifts varied from just over forty thousand to just under fifty thousand dollars annually. This is in addition to various other gifts.
Now it is important to note that Taherzadeh was posing as an agent of the Department of Homeland Security (the parent agency of the Secret Service) and he was doing so in such a depth that many people believed he in fact was a government agent. But given the Secret Service’s role protecting the President and other high level protectees as well as jurisdiction over counterfeiting and other financial crimes you really want to know when someone so much as picks up the tab for coffee for one of these agents. And yet, some guy who says he’s running an undercover task force about … well, something? says you can live in a fancy apartment for free?
That’s a big problem, and it’s an even bigger and different sort of problem when more than one officer thinks that’s somehow okay.
There have been a number of minor scandals over the last couple decades involving the Secret Service. This is clearly another. There seems to be a deep institutional rot in the organization. I don’t know quite how else to put it. This isn’t the kind of behavior or judgment you expect from an elite law enforcement agency. Or, maybe you do expect it, but it’s certainly not what you want from an agency entrusted with such critical tasks.
Also, I’ve now read through the affidavit supporting the arrest of these two men. Wow. It’s much more elaborate than what I’d understood from the first press write ups. It’s hard for me to imagine this wasn’t the work of some foreign government or a private company working for one. If I’m understanding the account, it goes something like this: There’s an apartment building in Washington, DC many residents of which are members of various federal law enforcement agencies. Not only were these two men impersonating federal law enforcement officers, they had also managed to gain access to or almost be running security for the building. They appear to have heavily wired the building to surveil it. They were also renting or somehow controlling a substantial number of apartments in the building. This is the pool of apartments from which they gave free accommodations to multiple Secret Service officers. (I think all of those were from the uniformed division, not the agents.) WTF, right?
So this is a pretty elaborate operation and despite my saying earlier that it didn’t seem that professional and had many loose ends they seem to have gotten a lot of people in various law enforcement agencies to believe they were legit. So it worked for a couple years until a Postal Inspector investigation stumbled upon it investigating an assault on a postal worker. So basically, it worked very well.
More to come.
