Corrupt, self-serving bureaucrats are everywhere in the federal government, even in the most elite and theoretically self-sacrificing arms like the Secret Service.  Carol D. Leonnig reports in the Washington Post:

Top Secret Service officials ­ordered members of a special unit responsible for patrolling the White House perimeter to abandon their posts over at least two months in 2011 in order to protect a personal friend of the agency’s director, according to three people familiar with the operation.

The new assignment, known internally as Operation Moonlight, diverted agents to a rural area outside the southern Maryland town of La Plata, nearly an hour’s drive from Washington. Agents were told that then-Director Mark Sullivan was concerned that his assistant was being harassed by her neighbor, the three people said.

Two agents were sent twice a day, in the morning and the evening, to monitor the home of the assistant, Lisa Chopey. The trips began June 30, 2011, and extended through the summer before tapering off in August, according to people familiar with internal shift records.

The agents were members of a surveillance team code-named Prowler, which patrols the outskirts of the White House compound and responds to reported problems. The unit is also tasked with monitoring the southern side of the White House whenever crowds gather to watch the president and first family travel via motorcade or helicopter.

Agents inside the Washington field office were concerned that Operation Moonlight increased security risks to the compound and the president, two people familiar with the discussion said.

Bad as this corruption is – and it is corrupt to appropriate resources paid for by taxpayers and use them for personal concerns – potentially worse is the fact they efforts of honest agents to expose this abuse may have been frustrated:

The agents thought the reassignment was a potentially illegal use of government resources. They were concerned enough about their own liability that they kept records of their involvement and their superiors’ instructions.

Some reported the operation to the inspector general for the Department of Homeland Security, the Secret Service’s parent agency. People familiar with the operation said a Senate committee’s recent finding that the former DHS ­inspector general softened and delayed investigations— particularly those critical of administration officials — renewed frustration that the issue may have not been properly investigated.

AT’s Ed Lasky has done yeoman’s work documenting the Obama administration's  war on inspectors general, those guardians who keep an eye on the federal government. Now that it has hit home, damaging President Obama’s own personal security, does anyone think the IGs will be allowed to do their jobs? I didn’t think so.