Meanwhile, Suarez, who gave an interview to The New York Times earlier in the week, has moved out of her house in the Bello Rincon gated community outside Cartagena. Men and women in two taxis were at the house throughout the morning, bringing out suitcases and other articles including a small pet’s cage. Suarez, 24, is a single mother.

Also on Friday, a Cartagena attorney, Marlon Betancourt, confirmed that Suarez had retained his services. But Betancourt would not say in a telephone interview why he’d been hired.

“We are still working on that and I am not prepared to say specifically what we intend to do until later,” said Betancourt. “Our goal is to restore the tranquility and rights that my client had before this event.”

In interviews with other reporters, Betancourt said Suarez had left Cartagena and gone into hiding because she was upset with the publication of her photos.

In Washington, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney rejected criticism from Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., and former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin that the scandal showed poor management. The two Republicans had said the prostitution scandal was part of a pattern that included other recent scandals, including the recent controversy over a General Services Administration conference in Las Vegas and loans to the now-bankrupt company Solyndra. In responding to the question, Carney also mentioned photographs of American soldiers abusing corpses in Afghanistan.

"It is preposterous to politicize the Secret Service; to politicize the terrible conduct of some soldiers in Afghanistan in a war that’s been going on for 10 years," Carney said. “It’s a ridiculous assertion that trivializes both the very serious nature of the endeavor that our military is engaged in in Afghanistan and the very serious nature … of the work that the Secret Service does."

Carney has said the White House has confidence in Secret Service Director Mark Sullivan to conduct the investigation and said Friday that Obama "wants the investigation that the Secret Service is leading to come to a completion. Once that completion is reached, if _ if the result is that the allegations that have been broadly reported turn out to be true, he will be angry about it."

Carney said he didn’t know whether or not Obama knew the two agents that have been named in the investigation.

"The president believes that his security and the overall security of the trip was never compromised," Carney said. "He has great faith in, broadly speaking, the Secret Service men and women who protect him and his family, protect the vice president, and members of the traveling staff; protect the grounds here."

He said Obama hasn’t talked to Sullivan, but that Sullivan has briefed the president’s chief of staff and deputy chief of staff.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story said that Palin and Sessions had linked the Secret Service scandal and the photos of U.S. soldiers abusing dead Afghans, but a review of their statements show that neither made that linkage, though Carney, responding to a question, did.