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U.S. Secret Service chief says reports of latest scandal exaggerated

Xinhua, March 20, 2015 Adjust font size:

The new chief of the beleaguered U.S. Secret Service said Thursday that recent reports about a "car crash" at the White House barricade by allegedly drunk senior agents were exaggerated and inaccurate.

"There was no crash," said Joseph Clancy in his second appearance before lawmakers this week. "There was no damage to the vehicle."

According to Clancy, the video of the March 4 episode showed that the vehicle involved drove at a speed of about two miles per hour before nudging aside a plastic barrel at a White House checkpoint.

The Washington Post revealed last week that two Secret Service officers barreled through a scene of an active bomb investigation near the White House in a government car after a late-night party earlier this month and ended up crashing into a White House barricade.

"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 March 12.

Meanwhile, Clancy acknowledged that video from certain angles of the incident were lost. However, he stressed that it was a traditional practice to tape over the content every 72 hours.

Clancy said he had already instructed his staff to contact the camera manufacturer to see whether the company could help retrieve the lost video.

According to CNN, the practice of erasing the tapes every 72 hours was severely questioned Tuesday in a closed-door meeting by the House Oversight Committee, with some committee members raising doubts why some videos were kept while others were lost.

During another of his hearing on the Secret Service budget Tuesday, Clancy admitted that he was kept in dark for five days about the incident till a whistleblower informed him of the alleged misconduct by email, an indication of lack of trust on the leadership within the agency. Endite