Life Inside the Bubble: Why a Top-Ranked Secret Service Agent Walked Away From It All (19 page)

I was notified of the unauthorized leak while on the set of the MSNBC afternoon show hosted by Thomas Roberts. While waiting to go live, I noticed Karla anxiously trying to get my attention through the glass doors leading into the studio. I asked the set director to take off my microphone and he responded by saying, “You’ve got two minutes.”

I briskly walked to the door and she said, “The
Huffington Post
has Joe’s name.”

I took the one minute I had left and angrily called the writer, upset at his need to publicly release my brother’s name before the facts were known. I told him to do what he felt necessary, knowing that he was going to print what he wanted regardless of my feelings. I returned to the set and did the show.

Shortly after leaving the studio, I contacted my sister-in-law, who was overwhelmed and struggling to comprehend what was happening. I warned her that the media had Joe’s name and was going to make it public. She was devastated. She loved my brother dearly, is a terrific mother to their two children, and was witnessing it all collapse around her.

With my sister-in-law weighing heavily on my mind, I attempted to call my brother again and this time he answered. I told him that I was furious and began to scream at him, upset at the damage this was causing our family. He told me that he had no idea what was going on, and that after he had eaten breakfast in the morning he was told to board a bus and leave Colombia. My brother explained that one of his team members had returned to the hotel with a woman and that he heard her complaining loudly in the hallway late at night. He and a Colombian police officer stationed on that floor in the hotel attempted to help her. He repeated to me again and again that he did not know what was really happening because he did not speak Spanish and she did not speak English. He insisted that he had no dealings with a prostitute.

The details of what happened in Colombia would be revealed over the course of the following days and weeks, but the personal impact on me and my family was immediate and immeasurable. My relationship with my sister-in-law and brother was damaged, my father was devastated and didn’t know how to respond, and while we were dealing with the fallout
in our own lives we were under an intense media spotlight. News crews were camped out in front of my brother’s home twenty-four hours a day and also began knocking on my door. Both of our phones rang incessantly with interview requests and the calls began to grow increasingly hostile, with one reporter telling me, “If your brother doesn’t talk I’ll park a news truck outside of his front door until he changes his mind.”

I did everything I could to give access to every media outlet that requested a comment. Eventually the stress of the media’s intense attention began to affect my daughter. She had a difficult time comprehending what was happening and the illicit nature of the activity made it difficult for me to explain. I decided at this point to cut off all interviews on the topic and move on.

I was honest and open in my public comments on the scandal and my feelings about how it was handled and that is now a matter for history. Personally, I was furious at the White House’s condescending response to the scandal and the fallout. These men erred terribly and nearly all of them paid for it by losing their jobs, some their spouses, and their reputations. The Secret Service acted quickly and immediately terminated those who broke the rules and embarrassed the agency, but ultimately, they were all men who would have given their lives for the president of the United States and his family without a second thought. Although their mistakes were now the subject of a growing international scandal, their actions never interfered with operational security and I felt the president’s harsh comments were inappropriate. He failed to acknowledge that this was a pattern of behavior that was not uncommon among his own staff members within the White House and other departments in the government.

I assure you, if the same level of investigative scrutiny was applied to the White House staff members conducting advance work as was applied to the Secret Service, the results would not be flattering. In the aftermath of the scandal, the media obtained a quote from an anonymous former Secret Service agent who alluded to unscrupulous behavior at “wheels-up parties.”

Wheels-up parties are informal gatherings of the entire advance team and the local officials involved in a presidential visit that occur after the president leaves town and Air Force One goes “wheels up.” These largely innocuous gatherings are typically uneventful thank-yous to the local officials for their support. I always found them to be a chore, but I attended to
pay my respects to the hard-working folks who make a safe visit a reality. Ironically, the only bad behavior I ever witnessed at these events was by intoxicated White House staff.

Despite the realities of both staff and agent behavior on the ground, the administration publicly berated the Secret Service and avoided any mention of cleaning up its own house. The rules seemed to apply only when there was a political advantage to be gained. Publicly attacking the Secret Service was a no-risk political play for the administration. The White House spin team knew that the Secret Service was not going to defend this abhorrent behavior and the president could appear as the disciplinarian. I blame the president’s team for using the situation as an opportunity to bolster their image, knowing that it is common knowledge that some of his own people have failed to uphold this public call for higher standards of conduct. The hypocritical calls for “accountability” from the administration and certain DC lawmakers (who, allegedly, may have participated in illicit activities themselves), speaks to the untouchable attitudes of a Washington, DC, class who view American citizens as misbehaving children and themselves as the disciplinarians.

B
Y THE EARLY SUMMER OF 2012
, the Colombia scandal had quieted down enough for me to focus completely on the remainder of my campaign. We continued working through the summer, knocking on countless doors, making thousands of phone calls, shaking tens of thousands of hands, and attending every crab feast, barbecue, community gathering, and parade that we could fit into the schedule. Despite the great efforts of my staff, volunteers, and family, I was not optimistic on Election Day of 2012. I had no reason to be. An unexpected and unfortunate turn of events had arisen late in the campaign
that made victory the longest of long shots. The campaign staff and I were completely caught off guard in late September when, with a little more than a month until the election, Rob Sobhani, a twice-failed candidate for the Republican nomination, decided to enter the race as an independent. And he had a war chest of six million dollars to finance his efforts for the remaining weeks of the campaign.

Sobhani’s entrance into the race was a devastating blow to our efforts to unseat Democratic incumbent Ben Cardin, but we were not knocked completely out. We began the campaign with no infrastructure, money, media presence, or volunteers, and despite nearly insurmountable odds we managed to build a three-thousand-person-strong, statewide grassroots team. We were a fixture on local media channels and made appearances on national cable networks. We were also raising significant amounts of money, out-fund-raising both the incumbent senator and the wealthy independent combined in the closing months of the campaign. With almost two months left in the campaign, we had cut our deficit in the polls in half.

Adding to the good news was an unexpected endorsement from Senator Jim DeMint’s Senate Conservatives Fund. I was honored to receive their backing and somewhat surprised at their willingness to invest in me despite the odds stacked against us. The endorsement was a testament to the organization’s priority of principles over cheap politics. Yet despite all of these positive developments, the tide turned quickly when Sobhani poured much of his six-million-dollar campaign fund into a media blitz attacking my candidacy. Having to deal with the onslaught not only from Senator Cardin but now from Sobhani as well was a political Armageddon for the team and for me.

Although the campaign was realistic about our slim chances at this point, we refused to give in and continued the fight on our turf. We had the strongest grassroots effort and doubled our phone-calling and door-knocking efforts. The best we could hope for at this point was a second-place finish. I felt that if we could at least hold on to the Republican base on Election Day, it would be a testament to the power of raw determination. Our media spend was dwarfed by the competition and I had no political resume to speak of, yet we were still able to get out a clear set of ideas and principles despite the electoral fog of both the presidential election and the negative ads run by the other candidates in my race.

Election night would be emotionally difficult for me, Paula, Isabel, and the staff. While driving to the hotel ballroom near BWI Airport, which we shared with Congressman Andy Harris, it began to sink in that it was over. We were going to lose, and no amount of passion or desire to change the direction of the country could fix that.

Paula and I were quiet on the thirty-minute drive, occasionally making small talk about insignificant events to distract ourselves from the pain of losing. We both dedicated our lives and fortunes to this effort and desperately wanted to believe that it had meant something. We knew when we arrived in the work area of the hotel and joined the campaign staff that it was over. My campaign staffers were just as dedicated as my family and I were to the race, and I felt that I owed them better than this. My campaign manager, Jim Gibbons, barely left the office in the final weeks leading up to the election, and Sharon, his deputy, looked as though she had expended every ounce of energy she had within her to bring us to victory. Kelly and Ally, two of my executive staff members, were sources of strength for me and allowed me to vent my feelings during the darker moments in the campaign; they wore looks of disappointment that broke my heart. As the first counties began to report their numbers, the second-place finish became a reality.

Unfortunately, there are no silver medals in politics. Only one contender is sworn in as a United States senator, only one hand is placed on that Bible in our Capitol, and that hand was not going to be mine. My daughter Isabel was devastated. I simply could not get through to her during the campaign that our chances of winning were remote. She believed in her daddy and no one, including me, was going to convince her otherwise. I picked her up and held her tightly and shed a tear listening to her ask me repeatedly why we lost. It was tough to regain my composure, but I knew I had a job to do that night. I had to call Senator Cardin and congratulate him on his win, and then deliver a concession speech in front of the many supporters, staff, and media outlets assembled in the hotel ballroom.

My conversation with the now-reelected Senator Cardin was neither awkward nor bitter. We agreed on very little politically but never engaged in any personal attacks and had become friendly while on the campaign trail. He thanked me for running a dignified campaign and
said he respected the amount of work I put in and wished me well in the future, and I responded in kind. After ending the phone call, I prepared for the last speech I was ever going to give as Maryland’s 2012 Republican nominee for the US Senate.

While delivering my concession speech that night, I could see that we had done something special. I looked out at the crowd as I was speaking and did not see many dry eyes. I composed the speech in the hallway just prior to speaking and used a text message I received from a friend earlier that day as inspiration. In that message my good friend Andrew thanked me for the noble effort and asked me to read the Bible passage Timothy 4:7. I kept a miniature Bible in my car and when I opened to the verse, I read, “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.”

I ended my speech with those words, resolved that I had done the right thing. I chose to trade financial security and a good job for the satisfaction of knowing that when it was time to take a stand and fight back, I did not stand idle.

It is easy in a country as prosperous as ours to succumb to the routine of a comfortable middle-class existence. There is a sedating quality to a life where the generational challenges of survival have largely disappeared. We live in a country and at a time where food is abundant, air-conditioned transportation awaits you in your garage, on-demand entertainment is only as far away as your remote control, and relative security in your home is the rule, not the exception. During my time and travels around the world with the Secret Service, the anesthetic of my comfortable life wore off and I became intimately familiar with the harsh realities of life outside our borders. I saw firsthand children with limbs hacked off in Rwanda who were now struggling with unimaginable health problems, Panamanian adults whose aspirations centered on basic survival rather than the American Dream of boundless prosperity, and even a French embassy employee who saw no future in his home country and told me he would do anything to become a US citizen.

When you see the contrast between our lives here in the US and the lives of citizens in nearly every other country around the world, your passion to defend the ideas that have made us exceptional can only grow. We are living in a political era where foundational American ideas—rule
of law, limited government, individual liberty—have come under harsh attack, despite the undeniable prosperity, power, and success that make our country a beacon and example for the rest of the world. If you believe that today is not the best that it is ever going to be, that tomorrow can and will be better, then you need to be willing to fight for it. Fighting for it requires action, not talk. Complaining about the political course of the country may temporarily alleviate some of the frustration associated with an unwanted national decline, but it will not right the ship. If you are not satisfied, you must act. Join your local political club, help register new voters, spread the message using every platform available to you, from social media to your book club. Go to town hall meetings and refuse to be silent. Political silence is always assumed to be complacency and makes you an accomplice to those who are determined to change the fabric of this country and denigrate the principles that made it great.