“It’s frustrating,” Ms. Pierson said in a 15-minute interview from New York City, where she was directing the agency’s protection of 140 world leaders attending the United Nations General Assembly."
9/22/14, "White House Intruder’s Past Raises Concern," NY Times, Michael D. Shear and Michael S. Schmidt
"Secret Service officers stopped Omar Jose Gonzalez last month as he carried a hatchet in front of the White House, but let him go even though he had been arrested this summer in Virginia with a mini-arsenal of semiautomatic weapons, a sniper rifle and a map clearly marking the White House’s location.
Prosecutors
on Monday also said Mr. Gonzalez, 42, an Iraq war veteran who on Friday
scaled an iron fence and made his way through the front door of the
White House before he was apprehended, had 800 rounds of ammunition, two
hatchets and a machete in his car when law enforcement officers
searched it after Friday’s incident.
.
.
A
judge on Monday agreed to a request by the prosecutors that Mr.
Gonzalez, who is from Copperas Cove, Tex., and believed to have been
living out of his car, remain in custody until a hearing next month
because he posed a danger to President Obama....
.
.
Julia
A. Pierson, the director of the Secret Service, said in an interview
that she had ordered a “full fact-finding investigation into what didn’t
work, where mistakes were made and how to ensure we prevent it in the
future.”...
.
.
But she
also strongly defended the 6,500-employee agency, saying repeatedly
that news media attention on the handful of mistakes that the agency
makes obscures the complex, difficult work that agents and officers do.
.
.
“It’s
frustrating,” Ms. Pierson said in a 15-minute interview from New York
City, where she was directing the agency’s protection of 140 world
leaders attending the United Nations General Assembly.
She added, “I don’t think the average American realizes the amount of work and complexity that goes into securing these events.”"...
.
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