Congress To Tackle Secret Service

Agreeing with the courts that Congress should decide the legal obligations of Secret Service employees, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee says he will seek legislation next year to define what those who guard the president must testify about what they see.

A federal appeals court in early July unanimously rejected the Justice Department's contention that agents need a so-called protective function privilege allowing them to remain silent about what the president says and does in their presence. Without that privilege, trust between a president and his bodyguard would be lost, the department contended.

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But the Judiciary Committee chairman, Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, urged the department not to appeal, saying it would only delay the conclusion of independent counsel Kenneth Starr's investigation.

Instead, he said, "I would look for a legislative remedy" that would strike a balance between requirements that Americans abide by laws and the need to protect the president.

"It may not be everything that the Secret Service would want," Hatch said in a TV interview "I think they themselves would admit there is no way that Secret Service people should not want to testify when crimes are being committed. They should not be participants in criminal activity."

Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., a senior member of the House Judiciary Committee, agreed that a line must be drawn between agents testifying on crimes and keeping silent on other matters, and that it was up to Congress to decide where that line should be.

"Obviously, if a Secret Service agent saw a crime being committed, he ought to be intervening, not just testifying," Frank said. But without some sort of legal privilege, he said, "they would have to testify before Congress on political conversations."

The Secret Service has argued that presidents, who have long chafed at being under the constant surveillance of bodyguards, would be even less cooperative - and put themselves at more risk - if they knew that anything overheard by an agent might be repeated in court.

"Nobody wants somebody around all the time, for every conversation they have, for every action they do," former Clinton White House counsel Abner Mikva said.
"And the more reasons you give a sitting president to resist that, the more liely there are going to be problems."

George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley countered that granting agents immunity from subpoenas "not only turns them into a form of personal household guard, it creates a little group of individuals, a cadre, who stand beyond the law. And that is very dangerous."