Spotlight: Gate-crashing incident latest on U.S. Secret Service's long list of scandals

For a U.S. federal agency with a name that suggests secrecy, putting itself repeatedly in the limelight for negative news coverage is quite a bitter irony.

The Secret Service, widely perceived as the most elite law enforcement team in the United States that protects the U.S. president and the First Family, landed itself in hot water again after U.S. media revealed earlier this week that two top Secret Service barreled through a scene of an active bomb investigation near the White House earlier this month in a government car after a late-night party and ended up crashing into a White House barricade.

The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the Secret Service, is currently conducting an investigation into the incident. The two agents involved are Mark Connolly, the second-in- command on the incumbent President Barack Obama's personal protection team, and George Ogilvie, a senior supervisor in the Washington field office.

"The officers for the Secret Service who monitor the safety of the White House complex and ultimately the president and his family felt that these two individuals may have been intoxicated," said Washington Post reporter Carol Leonning, who first broke the story that occurred on March 4, in an interview with CNN on Thursday.

The fresh baffling misstep by the Secret Service raised questions about whether Obama had made a right decision to pick Joseph Clancy, a veteran of the Secret Service, to lead the agency despite calls from critics to not choose an insider.

A special Department of Homeland Security panel said earlier that to root out deep-seated problems plaguing the agency, Obama should pick an outsider.

"The need to change, reinvigorate, and question long-held assumptions - from within the agency itself - is too critical right now for the next director to be an insider," said a report released by the panel last December.

After the gate-crashing incident, the White house said Obama still had full confidence in Clancy although he was disappointed at the alleged misconduct of agents.

"Nobody has higher standards for the Secret Service than Director Clancy," said White House spokesman Eric Schultz.

Clancy, former head of the service's presidential protective division, had served as interim director since last October after former head Julia Pierson was forced out following a series of security lapses and scandals in the agency, including a breach of the White House by a knife-wielding man.

The March 4 misconduct was the latest episode of scandals and misconduct which have long battered the image of the Secret Service during Obama's terms in office.

In November, 2009, an uninvited couple successfully passed through two security checkpoints at the White House and attended a state dinner for then Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. A picture that went viral online showed a grinning Obama greeting the female intruder.

In November, 2011, a gunman parked near the White House and fired multiple times at the building before fleeing the scene. When the shooting was on, one of the first daughters was inside the house. A Secret Service supervisor mistook the shooting sounds for car backfire and ordered agents to "stand down". The agency did not even realized that shots hit the building till four days later when a housekeeper found a broken window and a chunk of white concrete on the floor of the Truman Balcony.

In April, 2012, the Washington Post reported that a dozen agents were caught soliciting prostitutes when carrying out preparation work for a presidential trip to a summit in Colombia.

In May, 2013, a Secret Service supervisor from the president's security detail, the agency's most elite assignment, accidentally left a bullet in a woman's room at Washington's Hay-Adams hotel, which overlooks the White House. Later, it was also found that the supervisor had sent sexually suggestive emails to a woman subordinate.

In September, 2014, an armed security contractor managed to get on an elevator with Obama during a trip to Atlanta. The Secret Service agents only learned that the man was armed when they tried to stop him from filming Obama on his phone.

Also in September, 2014, a knife-wielding man with psychological problems jumped over the White House fence and dashed deep into the complex till he reached the doors of the East Room. Later report showed that a security alarm was muted at that time. Endite