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Julia Pierson, Secret Service Director, Resigns Under Pressure About Breaches - New York Times

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U.S. |Julia Pierson, Secret Service Director, Resigns Under Pressure About Breaches



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Secret Service agents are reflected in the glass of the briefing room door as Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, speaks to reporters about the appointment of an acting director of the service. Stephen Crowley/The New York Times




WASHINGTON — Julia Pierson resigned under pressure as director of the Secret Service on Wednesday after failing to quell a bipartisan political furor over repeated breaches of White House security and losing the confidence of the president her agency is charged with protecting.


Ms. Pierson’s support in the West Wing began crumbling late Tuesday, in large part because she did not tell the White House of a security failure in Atlanta last month when an armed man was allowed to ride in an elevator with President Obama at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.


Despite meeting with the president last week, Ms. Pierson informed him about the incident only minutes before it was reported in the news media on Tuesday evening, officials said.



Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, said Ms. Pierson’s delay in telling the president was a crucial part of “recent and accumulating reports about the performance of the agency” that led Mr. Obama to conclude that the Secret Service needed new leadership.




Julia Pierson before testifying in the House on Tuesday. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

After Ms. Pierson appeared at a brutal congressional hearing on Tuesday, when she had to explain to a House panel how an armed intruder jumped the White House fence on Sept. 19 and made it as far into the mansion as the East Room, she woke Wednesday to mounting calls for her resignation and withering criticism, some of it from Democrats.


By noon, Speaker John A. Boehner and Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the House’s top Democrat, had both called for independent inquiries into the security missteps, including the Secret Service’s response to a 2011 incident in which a man shot seven high-powered bullets into the south facade of the White House.


But Ms. Pierson was already on her way out. In a meeting Wednesday morning with Jeh C. Johnson, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security — which oversees the Secret Service — she offered her resignation, and he accepted it.


In a statement, Mr. Johnson said he had appointed Joseph Clancy, a former Secret Service agent in charge of the Presidential Protective Division, to become acting director. Mr. Johnson also bowed to demands for an outside inquiry and said he would appoint a “distinguished panel of independent experts” to report recommendations by Dec. 15.


For Ms. Pierson, the resignation ended a tumultuous two weeks that started when Omar J. Gonzalez, 42, an Iraq war veteran, evaded capture as he jumped the White House fence, ran across the North Lawn, barged through the unlocked door of the North Portico and knocked down an agent as he sprinted through the Entrance Hall to the Cross Hall to the East Room, the site of presidential news conferences and other formal events.


The outrage about the failure to stop Mr. Gonzalez escalated with news reports that law enforcement officers had previously encountered him, armed and with a map of the White House. Anger intensified after The Washington Post reported that the Secret Service had misled the public about how far Mr. Gonzalez got inside the White House. Initial reports by the Secret Service gave the impression that Mr. Gonzalez had been stopped just inside the North Portico.


But the tipping point, according to Mr. Earnest, came Tuesday night, when The Washington Examiner reported the incident in Atlanta. Law enforcement officials later confirmed that Secret Service officials were initially unaware that the private security guard riding in the elevator with Mr. Obama was armed. They discovered his weapon, they said, after he took pictures of the president and acting unprofessionally.


Officials said the Secret Service quickly began to investigate the incident. Hours after it occurred, on Sept. 16, senior agents met at the agency’s Atlanta field office to start an “after action review” to determine what had occurred and how it could be prevented in the future.


But the agency did not immediately inform anyone at the White House, Mr. Earnest said, and Ms. Pierson did not bring up the incident during an Oval Office meeting with Mr. Obama on Sept. 24, which had been arranged to discuss the fence-jumping case.


“I think if there’s a serious breach of the president’s security, that we would anticipate that, at a minimum, that White House officials would be informed in a timely fashion,” Mr. Earnest said.


Ms. Pierson also did not bring up the incident during several hours of testimony before the House panel on Tuesday. In an exchange with Representative Jason Chaffetz, Republican of Utah, Ms. Pierson said that she had briefed Mr. Obama about only one incident involving his safety in 2014 — the case involving Mr. Gonzalez.


“So the only time you’ve briefed the president on perimeter security, the president’s personal security, the first family’s security, has been one time in 2014,” Mr. Chaffetz said.


“That’s correct,” she replied, just hours before news reports broke about the Atlanta incident.


Ms. Pierson had not been Mr. Obama’s first choice to lead the Secret Service when he appointed her 18 months ago, according to several law enforcement officials. As the White House searched in 2013 for a new director to replace Mark Sullivan, who was retiring, White House officials first offered the job to David O’Connor, a longtime agency official who had recently taken a job as the head of global security for Bain Capital.


But despite making the offer to Mr. O’Connor, who was known as “the dean of discipline” during his time at the Secret Service, the White House continued to examine his background. Officials uncovered an incident in the mid-1990s in which he had been accused — and ultimately cleared by the Secret Service — of using a racial slur. Mr. O’Connor, who decided against taking the job, declined to comment.


Ms. Pierson, 55, a 30-year veteran of the agency who became director in 2013, took over after a Secret Service prostitution scandal in Cartagena, Colombia, the year before.


On Wednesday, the intruder who jumped the White House fence, Mr. Gonzalez, pleaded not guilty to charges of unlawfully entering a restricted government building while carrying a weapon, carrying a dangerous weapon in public and unlawfully possessing ammunition. The judge ruled that Mr. Gonzalez would remain in detention until another hearing on Oct. 21.


Representative Elijah E. Cummings, Democrat of Maryland, commended Ms. Pierson on Wednesday for stepping down, saying the move was in the best interest of the Secret Service and the president. But he said more change was necessary, including, possibly, more resignations.


“I don’t want us, after she’s left, to say to ourselves that everything is resolved,” Mr. Cummings said. “Clearly there was a culture there that was not healthy.”


In a brief interview with Del Quentin Wilber, a reporter for Bloomberg News, Ms. Pierson said that she had resigned because “Congress has lost confidence in my ability to run the agency,” according to a Twitter message from Mr. Wilber shortly after the resignation was announced.


Mr. Wilber also wrote that Ms. Pierson said: “I can be pretty stoic about all this, but not really. It’s painful to leave.”




Peter Baker, Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Emmarie Huetteman contributed reporting.



A version of this article appears in print on October 2, 2014, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Secret Service Director Resigns Under Pressure About Breaches.




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