article_snippet: Oversight Committee head Jason Chaffetz is issuing subpoenas to two Secret Service agents who witnessed an episode in which two allegedly intoxicated agency officials drove through a secure area at the White House, interrupting a bomb investigation.
article_snippet: the House Oversight Committee head Jason Chaffetz said two Secret Service agents who witnessed an episode in which two allegedly intoxicated agency officials drove through a secure area at the White House, interrupting a bomb investigation can shed light not only on the March 4 incident, 'but also on why the Secret Service appears to be systemically broken and in desperate need of both leadership and reform.'
article_snippet: Oversight Committee head Jason Chaffetz had asked Secret Service Director Joseph Clancy to allow four agents and officers to testify at a hearing last week on the March 4 incident.
article_snippet: The chairman of the House Oversight Committee, Rep. Jason Chaffetz, is issuing subpoenas to two Secret Service agents who witnessed an episode in which two allegedly intoxicated agency officials drove through a secure area at the White House, interrupting a bomb investigation .
article_snippet: Oversight Committee head Jason Chaffetz had asked Secret Service Director Joseph Clancy to allow four agents and officers to testify at a hearing last week on the March 4 incidentMarch 4 .
article_snippet: Secret Service Director Joseph Clancy is pictured here at a hearing .
article_snippet: Oversight Committee head Jason Chaffetz said the House Oversight Committee's top priority in Oversight Committee head Jason Chaffetz review of the March 4 incident is to ensure that the Secret Service keeps the president and the Secret Service family safe.
article_snippet: But Oversight Committee head Jason Chaffetz also wants the agency to be transparent.
article_snippet: Oversight Committee head Jason Chaffetz said Department of Homeland Security, the parent organization of the Secret Service, 'requested that information remain secret and be kept from Congress and the American people.'
article_snippet: Under such restrictions, the House Oversight Committee cannot perform the House Oversight Committee essential duties to evaluate and propose much-needed legislative reforms for the agency,' Oversight Committee head Jason Chaffetz said.
article_snippet: Secret Service had no comment on the subpoenas Tuesday evening.
article_snippet: I regret that Chairman Chaffetz and Chaffetz' staff have taken the unprecedented and unnecessary step of subpoenaing two members of the U.S. Secret Service with the responsibility for the protection of the president, his family and the White House complex,' Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said in a statement released Tuesday night. '
article_snippet: Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said this department offered to let 'a number of Secret Service personnel, including the two that have been subpoenaed' to participate in 'transcribed interviews with committee staff,' but Chaffetz and Chaffetz team rejected that offer.
article_snippet: The DHS head asserted that it is The DHS head job, as it is Clancy's, to protect Secret Service agents from the 'visibility, public glare, and inevitable second-guessing, of a congressional hearing' and the agency as a whole from having its work compromised.
article_snippet: In announcing the subpoenas Chaffetz said the Oversight Committee 'understands the sensitive nature of the Secret Service’s work and has made every attempt to perform the Secret Service’s oversight duties in light of those concerns.'
highlights_snippet: Oversight's chairman, Jason Chaffetz, had asked the Secret Service Director  to allow four agents and officers to testify at a hearing .
  
highlights_snippet: the Secret Service Director  's now handing out subpoenas because agency 'requested that information remain secret and be kept from Congress' and the public .
  