Washington - The White House has dismissed a report implicating a White House advance team member in a 2012 Secret Service prostitution scandal in Colombia and denied allegations that the team member's involvement had been covered up.
The White House said it stood by an internal investigation of the incident that found no wrongdoing.
That probe was conducted by then-counsel Kathryn Ruemmler, a former prosecutor who is seen as a possible contender to replace departing Attorney General Eric Holder.
The Washington Post reported on Thursday that hotel records suggested then-Yale law student Jonathan Dach, a volunteer on the White House advance team, may have hosted a prostitute in his Cartagena, Colombia, hotel room at the time of an April 2012 prostitution scandal involving Secret Service agents.
Reuters was not able to verify independently the Post's report.
Dach, now a policy advisor on global women's issues at the State Department, is the son of Leslie Dach, a Democratic donor who is now a top aide to Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell.
Jonathan Dach's lawyer, Richard Sauber, called the allegations “ludicrous” and “utterly and completely false”.
“The Post bases its allegations almost exclusively on a hotel log with the name of a prostitute and a room number. Yet neither Jonathan Dach's name nor his signature appears on the hotel log or any piece of paper with a foreign national,” Sauber said in a statement.
On the day of the alleged incident, Dach had been travelling for 20 hours, Sauber said.
“He was met at the airport by US embassy staff, driven to the hotel, checked in, went to dinner in US embassy vehicles with other members of the advance team and US embassy staff, and was driven back to his hotel in embassy vehicles, and then promptly went to bed, exhausted,” Sauber said.
The Post said the incident had not been thoroughly investigated, but White House spokesman Eric Schultz told reporters travelling on Air Force One there had been no cover-up and there were multiple media stories about the internal review in 2012.
He said the White House reviewed hotel records, talked to people on the trip, including the volunteer in question, and concluded there was no corroborating evidence of wrongdoing.
“On the matter of this White House review, we stand by it,” Schultz said, adding that Ruemmler conducted the review “in a careful, thorough way”.
The Post also reported the inspector general for the Department of Homeland Security investigated the Secret Service members, and that the lead investigator said he was pressured to withhold embarrassing details.
Schultz said the White House did not interfere and noted a separate Senate investigation did not substantiate allegations that changes were made to the inspector general's report for political reasons.
The 2012 incident, ahead of a visit by President Barack Obama, is one of a series of scandals capped by last month's White House intrusion by a man with a knife that led to increased scrutiny of the agency and the resignation of Director Julia Pierson. - Reuters