'Operation Moonshine' joins long list of Obama scandals

 

Federal documents obtained by the government watchdog Judicial Watch confirm Secret Service agents were “covertly deployed” from the White House to the private home of an aide to the agency director to monitor what essentially was a neighborhood fight over noise.

The scandal is the latest to join a massive list of Obama administration scandals that include Obamacare, Benghazi, executive amnesty, Veterans Administration fraud, spying on reporters, and Fast and Furious.

WND recently compiled a big list of Obama scandals and already identified a number associated with the Secret Service that included serious security breaches at the White House, agents soliciting prostitutes before a presidential visit and alcohol abuse.

Read the story of a top-ranked Secret Service agent who walked away from it all, in Dan Bongino’s “Life Inside the Bubble.”

Now Judicial Watch has received records from the Secret Service “that shed light into a scandalous operation in which agents were covertly redeployed from the White House compound to protect a close friend of the agency’s director during a dispute with a neighbor.”

The Judicial Watch report said the friend, Lisa Chopey, was also the administrative assistant of former Secret Service Director Mark Sullivan.

Chopey “was embroiled in a discord with a neighbor in her rural community of La Plata, Maryland.”

“At Chopey’s request the agency opened a federal investigation into the neighbor, Mike Mulligan, and surreptitiously redeployed agents assigned to guard the White House to protect her, the records show. Chopey accused Mulligan of ‘disturbing the peace’ by riding noisy ‘four wheelers’ around the neighborhood.”

Her father allegedly was assaulted, too.

So the Secret Service jumped in, conducting undercover surveillance on Mulligan, harassing him and running database checks, the report said.

“The effort was variously referred to as ‘Operation Moonlight’ and ‘Operation Moonshine,’ which is amusing considering drunken Secret Service agents, including a member of President Obama’s protective detail, recently made headlines for crashing a car into a White House barricade following a late-night party,” Judicial Watch said.

The scandal came to light when a story broke that “agents in a special surveillance unit were pulled off duty for at least two months to go an hour’s drive to Chopey’s Maryland home.”

The federal documents, obtained by Judicial Watch under a Freedom of Information Act case, said officials in the Washington Field Office “decided to utilize the Secret Service’s ‘Prowler’ team to conduct visits to the employee’s home, located in rural Maryland.”

“The Prowler assignment consists of a rotating team of two special agents assigned to the Washington Field Office who respond to suspicious persons and situations in and around the White House and the National Capital Region. The Prowler team agents use unmarked, fully equipped Secret Service vehicles and wear civilian clothes without Secret Service identifiers.”

On at least one occasion, two different teams of agents were dispatched to check the home the same day, the documents reveal.

The results of a government investigation found the employee’s “position as working in the director’s office and her friendship with high-level Secret Service officials created the appearance that it was that relationship, rather than furthering official government functions, that motivated the assignment.”

“On at least two of the days … the president was in the White House at the same time that the Prowler team was engaged in welfare checks in rural Maryland, at least 50 minutes away,” the government documents confirmed.

'Operation Moonshine' joins long list of Obama scandals
Bob Unruh
Thu, 04 Jun 2015 01:50:27 GMT