A member of the Secretary of State’s security team was arrested in Brussels after becoming physically aggressive with a hotel staff member and confrontational with local police, according to a new report.
Marco Rubio and his security team were in Brussels last week for a NATO summit when the incident occurred, according to The Washington Examiner. The Diplomatic Security Service, of which the member was a senior agent, is “aware of the incident” and the “allegations are being examined,” a State Department spokesperson said in a statement to The Independent.
The Diplomatic Security Service is the State Department’s security team, which protects diplomats and helps combat transnational crimes, including passport and visa fraud.
On March 31, a shift supervisor assigned to Rubio’s detail reportedly became irate when staff at Hotel Amigo refused to reopen the bar after it had closed. When the staff and night manager tried to tell the staff member to return to his room, he became physically aggressive, the Examiner reports, and law enforcement was called.
The security detail then got in an altercation with officers, leading to his arrest.
They released him from police custody hours later after the U.S. embassy intervened, according to the Examiner.
The Examiner did not publish the agent’s name, and the State Department did not provide the agent’s name when asked by The Independent.
An anonymous State Department employee told the Examiner that shift supervisors on Rubio’s detail have “an incomprehensible workload.”
“They are responsible for all the agents under them, scheduling, evaluations and a preposterous amount of admin work [as well as] performing the actual shift work,” the employee said.
“They work 6 to 7 days a week,” the employee added. “I truly believe this [incident] was the result of incomprehensible strain [the agent] was placed under and, at the very least, [Diplomatic Security Service] owes [the agent] a very fair evaluation of these circumstances in their totality – looking deep into [DSS’s] own role [in what happened].”
