Secret Service Seeks Race of Media Guests

WASHINGTON —  The U.S. Secret Service has asked for the race of guests attending a media reception with President Bush before the annual White House Correspondents’ Assn. dinner Saturday.

Some senior correspondents who cover Bush regularly and have attended the reception in past years said they had not been asked for race information previously and were shocked at the request.

“[White House] reporters already have hard [permanent] passes, have gone through all the checks and are often in reach of the president,” Edwin Chen of the Los Angeles Times, who is secretary of the association, said Friday. “I think it’s unnecessary and offensive.”

The Secret Service said it routinely asked for information about the race of people who were going to be in close proximity to the president.

“It’s nothing to do with racial profiling,” said Tom Mazur, spokesman for the Secret Service. “We wouldn’t tolerate any racial or cultural bias in these types of matters.”

The agency asks for five “identifiers” of people who will be near the president to run through a criminal database, Mazur said. The five factors -- name, date of birth, Social Security number, gender and race -- are used to search the database “in a most timely and effective manner,” he said.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan said it was a law enforcement matter.