Up to 20 women involved in Secret Service sex scandal?

CBS updates viewers today on the Secret Service sex scandal with a few interesting new tidbits — like the numbers. The advance team may have engaged as many as 20 women in the Pley Club while bragging about their job and specific assignment to protect the President, and the fight over the bill not only took place in the club, it spilled out into the street as well. Ten members of the military have now been caught up in the scandal, including some from special forces units. But the most damning revelation of all might be that the investigators will now start administering polygraphs — because the agents/suspects keep telling different stories about what happened in Cartagena:

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CBS News has learned that the Secret Service now wants to polygraph the individuals involved in this scandal. A senior law enforcement official says it is just one part of the investigation and that “we want to use every possible tool to get to the bottom of this.”

If you’re disappointed that the investigation has taken place in privacy, worry not. Senators Susan Collins (R-ME) and Joe Lieberman (I-CT) are threatening to hold hearings in their Senate Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs Committee, a rather ironic name under the circumstances. Both want to know whether the women had access to sensitive data prior to Barack Obama’s arrival in Colombia, which so far the Secret Service denies:

At least 20 foreign women and as many Secret Service officers and Marines met at a hotel in Colombia in an incident involving prostitution, and lawmakers are seeking information about any possible threat to the U.S. or to President Barack Obama who arrived for a conference soon after, congressional officials said Tuesday.

In briefings throughout the day, Secret Service Director Mark Sullivan told lawmakers that 11 members of his agency met with 11 women at a hotel in Cartagena and that more foreign females were involved with American military personnel. …

“Twenty or 21 women foreign nationals were brought to the hotel,” Sen. Susan Collins, the ranking Republican on the Homeland Security Committee, said Sullivan told her. Eleven of the Americans involved were Secret Service, she reported, and “allegedly Marines were involved with the rest.”

Meanwhile, Sullivan told the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee that the 11 Secret Service agents and officers were telling different stories to investigators about who the women were. Sullivan has dispatched more investigators to Columbia to interview the women, said Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y.

“Some are admitting (the women) were prostitutes, others are saying they’re not, they’re just women they met at the hotel bar,” King said in a telephone interview. Sullivan said none of the women, who had to surrender their IDs at the hotel, were minors. “But prostitutes or not, to be bringing a foreign national back into a secure zone is a problem,” King said.

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Indeed — and that’s not even counting the risks of potential “honey trap” espionage operations and blackmail opportunities.

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