E-mails show racism in Secret Service

WASHINGTON, May 9 (UPI) -- Supervisors in the U.S. Secret Service exchanged e-mails with racist jokes, some of them sexual, a document filed in federal court Friday said.

The filing came in a discrimination lawsuit filed in 2000 by 10 black Secret Service agents, The New York Times reported.

One 2003 e-mail joked about the Rev. Jesse Jackson and his wife being on an airplane hit by a missile. The e-mail referred to Jackson as the "Righteous Reverend."

Lawyers for the plaintiffs said another e-mail -- containing a crude joke about sex illustrated with a picture of a naked black man and white woman -- was sent by Donald White, now head of the presidential protective detail, to Kurt Douglass, agent in charge of the Cincinnati office.

The government missed a March deadline for turning over the e-mails by a month, the newspaper said. Lawyer E. Desmond Hogan said he was "shocked but not surprised" by the delay.

"The government's delay follows a pattern of the Secret Service stonewalling plaintiffs and ignoring court orders, depriving African-American agents of the fundamental evidence of race discrimination that is key to their claims," he said.