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 The White House said it stood by an internal investigation of the
incident that found no wrongdoing. That probe was conducted by
then-counsel Kathryn Ruemmler, a former prosecutor who is seen as a
possible contender to replace departing Attorney General Eric
Holder.
The Washington Post reported on Thursday that hotel records
suggested then-Yale law student Jonathan Dach, a volunteer on the
White House advance team, may have hosted a prostitute in his
Cartagena, Colombia, hotel room at the time of an April 2012
prostitution scandal involving Secret Service agents.
Reuters was not able to verify independently the Post's report.
Dach, now a policy advisor on global women's issues at the State
Department, is the son of Leslie Dach, a Democratic donor who is now
a top aide to Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Mathews
Burwell.
Jonathan Dach's lawyer, Richard Sauber, called the allegations
"ludicrous" and "utterly and completely false."
 "The Post bases its allegations almost exclusively on a hotel log
with the name of a prostitute and a room number. Yet neither
Jonathan Dach's name nor his signature appears on the hotel log or
any piece of paper with a foreign national," Sauber said in a
statement.
On the day of the alleged incident, Dach had been traveling for 20
hours, Sauber said.
"He was met at the airport by U.S. embassy staff, driven to the
hotel, checked in, went to dinner in U.S. embassy vehicles with
other members of the advance team and U.S. embassy staff, and was
driven back to his hotel in embassy vehicles, and then promptly went
to bed, exhausted," Sauber said.
The Post said the incident had not been thoroughly investigated, but
White House spokesman Eric Schultz told reporters traveling on Air
Force One there had been no cover-up and there were multiple media
stories about the internal review in 2012.
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He said the White House reviewed hotel records, talked to people on
the trip, including the volunteer in question, and concluded there
was no corroborating evidence of wrongdoing.
"On the matter of this White House review, we stand by it," Schultz
said, adding that Ruemmler conducted the review "in a careful,
thorough way."
The Post also reported the inspector general for the Department of
Homeland Security investigated the Secret Service members, and that
the lead investigator said he was pressured to withhold embarrassing
details.
Schultz said the White House did not interfere and noted a separate
Senate investigation did not substantiate allegations that changes
were made to the inspector general's report for political reasons.
The 2012 incident, ahead of a visit by President Barack Obama, is
one of a series of scandals capped by last month's White House
intrusion by a man with a knife that led to increased scrutiny of
the agency and the resignation of Director Julia Pierson.
(Reporting by Roberta Rampton.; Editing by Richard Chang and Andre
Grenon)
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