Secret Service lawsuit turns up evidence of racism reaching all the way to Obama’s security detail

A discrimination lawsuit against the US Secret Service that’s been wending its way through the courts for the past eight years has produced, among other things, an embarrassing trail of racist jokes and remarks in Secret Service email files. And today David Johnston of the New York Times writes that one of the supervisors implicated in circulating those emails was until recently the head of Barack Obama’s security detail.

This follows a report by Johnston last week in which he described the emails, obtained through discovery proceedings in a suit filed back in 2000 by 10 black agents, as follows: “Secret Service supervisors shared crude sexual jokes and engaged in racially derogatory banter about blacks, and passed around an anecdote about a possible assassination of the Rev. Jesse Jackson, according to internal e-mail disclosed in a federal court filing on Friday by lawyers for black Secret Service agents…. The messages were written mainly from 2003 through 2005, and were sent to and from e-mail accounts of at least 20 Secret Service supervisors. The messages offer a glimpse into the darker recesses of an agency known for protecting presidents and other dignitaries but whose culture is regarded as one of the most insular in federal law enforcement.”

These disclosures come a couple of weeks after a separate incident in which a Secret Service agent at the Beltsville, Maryland, training center was suspended for leaving a noose in the classroom of an African-American instructor.

The whole matter has gotten little attention in major American media to date, apart from those Times stories and one in the Washington Post. But as the Telegraph of London reported yesterday, Jesse Jackson is demanding to see all Secret Service documents pertaining to him dating all the way back to his 1980s presidential campaigns. 

Bonnie Goldstein of Slate posted several sample emails from the court filing here.

Previously: Secret Service apparently botched Obama security at Dallas rally in February.