Washington: The Secret Service director is reviewing her agency’s actions in a 2011 shooting at the White House as well as during an intrusion this month by an armed Texas man who got through the North Portico front door before he was stopped, the deputy national security adviser said on Sunday.
The director, Julia Pierson, is scheduled to testify on Tuesday before a special House committee that was called after the Sept. 19 security breach in which a man climbed the Pennsylvania Avenue fence, dashed across the North Lawn and into the White House itself.
Her task became potentially more complicated over the weekend with the publication of a news report detailing Secret Security failings in a 2011 incident that agents did not identify as a shooting until four days later.
“I know the Secret Service is on top of this, and they will take every necessary step to correct any problems,” Anthony J. Blinken, the deputy national security adviser, said Sunday on the CNN programme “State of the Union.”
Some of the Secret Service’s lapses in the November 2011 incident were already known — like the days-long delay in concluding that a gun was fired — but the new report, published Saturday night on The Washington Post’s website, detailed myriad other failings. The Post also said the incident angered President Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle, who were not at the White House at the time of the shooting, but whose younger daughter was at home with her grandmother when seven bullets hit the building.
Last week, Obama expressed confidence in the agency as an investigation continued into how the Texas man, Omar J. Gonzalez, 42, was able to make it across the White House lawn unhindered.
Blinken also publicly supported the agency on Sunday. “Their task is incredible, and the burden that they bear is incredible,” Blinken said.
Pierson, who has been the agency’s director for 18 months, has been called to appear before the House Oversight Committee at a hearing titled “White House Perimeter Breach: New Concerns About the Secret Service.”
Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, said last week that Pierson and other Secret Service officials had “some serious questions to answer.”
“We have a lot of good men and women,” he said, adding that “over the last five years or so, their lustre of elite protection has lost its shine.”
Not all of the agency’s problems involve White House security. In 2012, a dozen agents were caught with prostitutes in their rooms before a summit meeting that Obama attended in Cartagena, Colombia.
Pierson, 55, was appointed to prevent such scandals. But last March, Pierson was forced to send two agents home from an official trip to Amsterdam after they became so drunk that one of them passed out in the hallway of a hotel.
Pierson had to explain the incident to Obama in person while she travelled with him on the trip.
In the 2011 shooting, the gunman, Oscar Ramiro Ortega-Hernandez, 21, of Idaho Falls, Idaho, had told a friend that the president was “the Antichrist” and that he “needed to kill him,” according to papers later filed in court. He pleaded guilty to firearms and property damage charges related to terrorism and was sentenced in April to 25 years in prison.
In the latest episode, Gonzalez, of Copperas Cove, Texas, was carrying a folding knife with a serrated blade when he was arrested, according to a criminal complaint filed in U.S. District Court.
Pierson — who started as a field agent in Florida and has worked for the agency for 31 years — said that the Secret Service came into contact with roughly 60 people a year outside the White House, many of them showing signs of mental illness. Gonzalez told officers that he needed to deliver a message to the president about the atmosphere failing.
