New York Times – by MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT
WASHINGTON — The investigator who led the Department of Homeland Security’s internal review of the Secret Service’s 2012 prostitution scandal quietly resigned in August after he was implicated in his own incident involving a prostitute, according to current and former department officials.
Sheriff’s deputies in Broward County, Fla., saw David Nieland, the investigator, entering and leaving a building they had under surveillance as part of a prostitution investigation, according to officials briefed on the investigation. They later interviewed a prostitute who identified Mr. Nieland in a photograph and said he had paid her for sex.
Mr. Nieland resigned after he refused to answer a series of questions from the Department of Homeland Security inspector general about the incident, the officials said.
A spokesman for the Homeland Security Department’s inspector general said in a statement that he could confirm only that Mr. Nieland resigned in August. But the spokesman added that department officials “became aware in early May of this year of an incident in Florida that involved one of our employees.”
“While the law prohibits us from commenting on specific cases, we do not tolerate misconduct on the part of our employees and take such allegations very seriously,” said the spokesman, William O. Hillburg. “When we receive information of such misconduct, we will investigate thoroughly, and, during the course of or at the conclusion of such an investigation, we have a range of options available to us, including administrative suspension and termination.”
In an email message on Tuesday, Mr. Nieland said, “The allegation is not true,” and declined to answer any questions.
The inspector general’s office and the Broward County Sheriff’s Office have investigations underway. But Mr. Nieland has not been charged by federal or local authorities in connection with the incident.
For months, Mr. Nieland has been at the center of a dispute over whether the Obama administration tried to cover up the involvement of a volunteer member of a White House advance team in the scandal that resulted in the firing of eight Secret Service agents who were on assignment in Cartagena, Colombia, for a visit by President Obama in April 2012. The agents were dismissed after it became known that they had had prostitutes in their hotel rooms.
Mr. Nieland was the head of the inspector general’s Miami office when he was asked to lead an investigation of how the Secret Service handled the scandal. The inspector general’s office of the Department of Homeland Security has oversight of the Secret Service and the other agencies that make up the department.
That September, the inspector general’s office released a 65-page report that described in detail how 13 Secret Service agents and officers had “personal encounters with female Colombian nationals” before Mr. Obama’s arrival.
In an interview with staff members of a Senate Homeland Security subcommittee after the report became public, Mr. Nieland said that during its preparation, he had been asked to delete derogatory information because it was potentially damaging to the administration during an election year. That information, he told the subcommittee investigators, was that a volunteer member of the White House advance team in Cartagena also had a prostitute in his room.
But in its own report, released this year, the subcommittee said the changes in the inspector general’s report were part of the ordinary editing process, and it found no evidence to substantiate Mr. Nieland’s claims. The White House also denied that it had intervened in the preparation of the report, and said it had investigated the allegations against the White House volunteer but determined that they were not true.
In recent months, congressional Republicans have cited Mr. Nieland’s statement as evidence that the White House mishandled its investigation of the Cartagena incident. Representative Jason Chaffetz, Republican of Utah, said in an Oct. 3 letter to the White House that he was concerned that Secret Service agents who were caught with prostitutes were “used as scapegoats to cover up what is potentially a broader problem.”
“Recently, I have received information from credible sources that records also identified a White House staff person as checking in a female foreign national as an overnight guest during the same trip and that steps were taken by the administration to cover up or deflect their involvement in the initial incident,” he said.
In 2013, according to department officials, Mr. Nieland accused the inspector general’s office of retaliating against him for making those allegations when it suspended him for two weeks without pay after he circulated photographs that he had taken of a female intern’s feet.
The intern asked to be transferred out of the office after the incident. Mr. Nieland, according to the officials, said he had circulated the images as a joke.
When deputies in Florida stopped Mr. Nieland last May after seeing him leave the building they had under surveillance, he showed them a badge, officials said, and told them that he was part of an undercover human trafficking operation with agents from the Department of Homeland Security.
Mr. Nieland then reported to officials in the inspector general’s office that he had been stopped by the police because of a broken tailgate light. Those officials contacted the sheriff’s office, which told them he had said he was working on an investigation.
When the Homeland Security officials said there was no such investigation, sheriff’s deputies searched for and found a prostitute who identified Mr. Nieland from a photograph and said he had paid her for sex that night. Homeland Security officials then tried to question Mr. Nieland, but he refused to respond to them or to a subpoena they served on him.
On Aug. 9, he resigned, citing health problems. Four days later, he posted on Twitter that his career in government had come to an end.
“Thank you to all who congratulated me on #retirement. On to the next chapter. Lets fix these problems and keep #USA#1!” he said.
Nieland probably thought he was back in the land of his people in is-real-hell. Land of the brothels, deviants and forced sex slaves.
“Thank you to all who congratulated me on #retirement. On to the next chapter. Lets fix these problems and keep #USA#1!” he said.
I think he didn’t finish his sentence. Keep USA#1 in the crosshairs of zio-communism. And as always he was dutifully rewarded with an early retirement.
If it had been a common citizen like you or me they would have made our lives a living hell and done all they could to rape us in the court system,you know the criminal court system ran by the criminals! Law enforcement is felons creating felons because some needs to tell these treasonous bastards that treason is a felony too!