Sunday Sound: Heard on 'This Week'
— -- Below are some of the notable comments made Sunday on "This Week with George Stephanopoulos."
HEADLINERS
Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, the top Republican on the Senate Homeland Security Committee, and Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-NY, who serves on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, spoke with George Stephanopoulos about the secret service sex scandal and GSA.
1. Sen. Susan Collins said that according to Secret Service director Mark Sullivan, there is no evidence that the women who were allegedly solicited by secret service agents in Colombia earlier this month were underage.
COLLINS: He told me that at this point there is no evidence of underage women.
2. Rep. Carolyn Maloney and Sen. Susan Collins suggested that the Secret Service' sex scandal could potentially have been prevented if more women were part of the organization.
COLLINS: I can't help but wonder if there'd been more women as part of that detail if this ever would have happened.
MALONEY: I can't help but keep asking this question 'where are the women?' We probably need to diversify the Secret Service and have more minorities and more women.
3. COLLINS: .… Most Secret Service agents do an extraordinary job, and they're very disciplined and professional. But what are Secret Service personnel doing bringing unknown foreign nationals to their rooms, regardless of their age?
4. Collins finds it hard to believe that this is the first illicit incident involving the Secret Service based upon who was allegedly involved.
COLLINS: Now, I recognize that the vast majority of Secret Service personnel are professional, disciplined, dedicated, courageous. But to me it defies belief that this is just an aberration. There were too many people involved. If it had been one or two, then I would say it was an aberration. But it included two supervisors. That is particularly shocking and appalling.
5. COLLINS: … I would distinguish this situation from GSA. In the case of GSA, the administration clearly bears responsibility, because the head of that agency received an alert from the inspector general way last year that...
STEPHANOPOULOS: Back in May of 2011.
COLLINS: ... there were problems, exactly, and took no action. That's very different. She was a member of the president's administration, and she deserved to be fired, and the president is responsible in that case. In the case of the Secret Service, I believe the director thus far has acted exactly appropriately and is trying to get to the bottom of it. And the president bears no role in that scandal.
THE ROUNDTABLE
Keith Olbermann, ABC News' George Will, political strategist and ABC News contributor Donna Brazile, political strategist and ABC News political analyst Matthew Dowd, and Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan discussed the Secret Service and GSA scandals.
6. OLBERMANN: Well, if you're going to -- if you're going to extrapolate from these two scandals to the entirety of government I think is a mistake. First off, GSA has been a problem for a long time, not just under this presidential administration. As many people have pointed out, with the Secret Service scandal in Colombia, is it possible that this was suddenly the idea of six, 10, a dozen agents for the first time, they said, "On this trip, let's go and do this"? If we have that -- the one value of what Governor Palin pointed out was that the -- sort of degrading of the code of the Secret Service began late in 2008, early in 2009...
7. NOONAN: You look at the stories of the past week, GSA and that scandal which we'll get to, the Secret Service, various other ones, you have to wonder what is going on with those adults in serious, responsible, publicly-paid-for positions, who have, it seems to me, less and less of a sense of probity, responsibility, the sort of basic adultness and maintaining of standards that we ought to be used to. It seems to me we've got a big slip going on there and these two stories are part of it.
