By KIRK JOHNSON
But now the blip has become a blowup, with Secret Service agents — under oath in court depositions — accusing one another of unethical and perhaps even illegal conduct in the handling of Mr. Howards’s arrest and the official accounting of it.
The revelations arise from a lawsuit Mr. Howards filed against five Secret Service agents, accusing them of civil rights and free-speech violations. They offer a rare glimpse into the inner workings of the Secret Service, which usually wears the standoffish, plainclothes cool of its mission like a cloak of invisibility.
The agent who made the arrest, Virgil D. Reichle Jr., said in a deposition that he was left hanging with an untenable arrest because two agents assigned to the vice president had at first agreed with a Denver agent that there had been assault on Mr. Cheney by Mr. Howards, then changed their stories to say that no assault had occurred.
Mr. Reichle, who did not witness the encounter, said in his deposition that he believed the vice president’s security detail had wanted the Howards arrest to go away so that Mr. Cheney would not be inconvenienced by a court case.
Mr. Cheney has not been deposed, and his involvement in the arrest remains uncertain. But one of the three agents assigned to him, Daniel McLaughlin, said in his deposition that Mr. Reichle’s description was backward.
Mr. McLaughlin said Mr. Reichle, who has since been transferred to Guam, asked him in a call several hours after the encounter to say that there had been an assault to bolster justification for the arrest.
By then, Mr. McLaughlin and another agent assigned to Mr. Cheney who is also a defendant in the lawsuit, Adam Daniels, had already filed statements that said there had been contact, but no assault. Another agent and co-defendant, Dan Doyle, who was based in the Denver office, sided with his officemate, Mr. Reichle, and said there had been. The fifth defendant, Kristopher Mischloney, an agent on Mr. Cheney’s security team, said he was not close enough to see, but was named in the suit because he had assisted in the arrest.
Changing an agent’s report would have been a federal crime.
“Did you believe that Agent Reichle was telling you in essence, ‘I want you to commit the crime of making false statements in an officially filed Secret Service document?’ ” asked a lawyer for Mr. Howards, David A. Lane.
“When he made the phone call, that’s what I — I interpreted it as, that was unethical,” Mr. McLaughlin responded, according to a transcript of his deposition.
“Not just unethical but illegal?” Mr. Lane pressed.
“Yes, sir.”
In some ways, the hundreds of pages of transcripts of interviews of Secret Service agents — sealed under a court order that expired last week and obtained by The New York Times from Mr. Lane — have compounded the original questions about what actually happened that afternoon, when Mr. Cheney and Mr. Howards, a 55-year-old environmental consultant, came together at the Beaver Creek Resort, about two hours west of Denver.
Police procedural questions about whether Mr. Cheney was lightly patted on the shoulder, as Mr. Howards contends, or hit harder in a kind of straight-arm shove, as one Secret Service agent witness contends, or something in between as other agents have described, have been buried under a recrimination-laced free-for-all over what came next.
About 10 minutes or so after the encounter, well after Mr. Howards had walked away, he was arrested, and the Secret Service agents involved went about preparing their individual statements about what happened.
A spokesman for the Secret Service, Eric Zahren, said that because the case was open, he could make no comment and allow no interviews with the agents involved. A spokesman for Mr. Cheney referred questions about the case to the Justice Department; a spokesman there declined to comment because the suit is continuing.
Lee Adds: When did anu Judges get the idea that an act to disrupt our VP was protected by the US Constitution? This is outrageous!
