Washington DC police released video on Tuesday of a black SUV driven by a secret service agent nudging aside a traffic barrel as it returned to the White House on a late night earlier this month.
An internal secret service inspector is investigating whether the employee driving the vehicle was drunk at the time. The barrel was in place to restrict traffic in an area where a suspicious package had been dropped off about an hour earlier by an unidentified vehicle.
The package was later found to be harmless. The driver who had dropped it off was later arrested and charged.
The emergence of the video, at a congressional hearing at which the secret service director, Joseph Clancy, was testifying, marked a twist in a story that has seen Clancy make three trips now to Capitol Hill to explain what happened.
On Tuesday he visited the House oversight and government reform committee, and for the first time audience members got to see video of the incident in question.
“It was a very delicate movement of the barrel with the vehicle,” Clancy said.
In Clancy’s account, two secret service employees, including a senior member of the president’s protective detail, had been at a reception that night, 4 March, and were returning just before midnight to pick up a car one had left on White House grounds.
They encountered the barrel. In the video their SUV can be seen slowly moving it several meters out of the way.
“It was more of a nudge,” Clancy said Tuesday. “It was on the right side of the bumper … It was more of a purposeful move.”
Last Thursday he told senators in prepared remarks that “there was no crash”, claiming: “The video shows the vehicle entering the White House complex at a speed of approximately 1-2mph, and pushing aside a plastic barrel.”
The agents involved in the incident have not been identified. The secret service has separate video it will not release until its internal investigation is complete, Clancy told Congress.
Additional video had been lost, he said, because cameras outside the White House automatically tape over old footage after 72 hours.
Clancy did not learn about the incident until five days after it happened, he said.
The secret service is charged with protecting the life of the president and with fighting counterfeiting and online fraud.
The agency has been caught up in multiple embarrassing incidents involving employee drunkenness over the past three years, including a March 2014 incident in which an agent on a trip to the Netherlands was found passed out drunk in a hotel hallway.
The reputation of the agency was further damaged in September when an invader jumped the White House fence and made it inside the building before he was stopped.
