WASHINGTON — A man who jumped the White House fence this month made it far deeper into the president’s home than previously disclosed, overpowering a female Secret Service agent inside the North Portico entrance and running through the East Room before he was tackled, according to a congressional official familiar with the details of the incident.
The man, Omar J. Gonzalez, was finally stopped as he tried to enter the Green Room, the official said. Earlier, Secret Service officials had said Gonzalez, 42, had only made it steps inside the North Portico after running through the front door.
The new development, first reported by The Washington Post, will create an explosive hearing Tuesday when a bipartisan panel of lawmakers intends to grill Julia Pierson, director of the Secret Service, about whether a lax and undisciplined culture inside the long-heralded agency has badly eroded its ability to protect the president and his family, several members of Congress said Monday.
It has been unheard-of in recent decades for an intruder to enter the White House, even if only a few steps inside what is supposed to be one of the most secure buildings in the world. The fact that Gonzalez was able to pass by the staircase in the Grand Foyer that leads to the White House family quarters — and get as far as the East Room, the site of presidential speeches, news conferences and bill signings — stunned Washington.
The new details paint a strikingly different picture than Secret Service officials described on the day after Gonzalez breached the building. In a statement on Sept. 20, the agency said Gonzalez “was physically apprehended after entering the White House North Portico doors’’ — leaving the impression that Secret Service officers tackled Gonzalez just steps after he opened the door and walked through.
Secret Service officials said nothing in their public comments after the incident to suggest otherwise.
The Secret Service did not inform the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the agency, that the intruder had made it much farther inside the White House during initial briefings after the incident, according to an official familiar with the conversations. The official stressed that until a final investigation was complete, the department could not confirm or deny the new account.
There has been “internally conflicting data that has come up since the initial report,” the official said.
White House officials declined to comment on the new information about Gonzalez, referring all questions to the Secret Service. A spokesman for the Secret Service also declined to comment.
Asked about the new disclosures, Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, referred to comments he made to reporters earlier in the day. At his daily briefing, Earnest said the president retained “full confidence” in Pierson but said the incident was “an issue that the president is obviously concerned about.”
It is unclear when President Barack Obama learned of how far Gonzalez had penetrated the White House. West Wing officials previously said Pierson briefed Obama about the incident during an Oval Office meeting last week, but the officials would not say what details she disclosed at the time.
Pierson, who will be the sole witness to appear before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, will hear from lawmakers in both parties who said they would demand explanations for other breaches as well, including recent revelations about a slow and incomplete response by the Secret Service to a 2011 incident in which a man fired seven shots into the south side of the White House.
“Have there been some other serious breaches? Absolutely,” said Rep. Jason Chaffetz, of Utah, a Republican on the committee. He said the 2011 incident was “about as bungled as could possibly be,” but he said lawmakers on the committee have received numerous reports about security breaches that have not yet been made public.
“She’s got a lot to answer for,” he said. “I want to give her a chance. But I see this as a total lack of leadership and very questionable protocol.”
Rep. Elijah E. Cummings of Maryland, the senior Democrat on the committee, said he would insist that Pierson explain why Secret Service officials in charge of protection around the grounds of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue appear not to have listened to agents on the ground that night who believed shots had been fired at the White House.
“I want to know what culture allows that to happen in an organization that is supposed to be the most elite protective agency in the world,” Cummings said. “How does that happen? We have to go to not just what happened but why it happened.”
An investigative timeline of the 2011 incident prepared by the FBI and obtained by The New York Times describes a long series of interviews Secret Service agents conducted as they sought to build a case against the man who fired the bullets while parked on Constitution Avenue across the Ellipse from the White House.
But the document also confirms that the Secret Service did not know for four days that bullets had actually hit the White House. The service was alerted at 12:38 p.m. by an “executive residence usher” who had discovered the damage.
“A hole in the window of the Yellow Oval Room at the White House had been discovered,” the document states, along with the discovery that “two confirmed impacts of what appeared to be 7.62 mm rounds struck the window but did not penetrate the ballistic glass.”
The Washington Post reported that the president and Michelle Obama were furious that they had not been made aware of the incident until days after it happened.
Although Pierson will clearly be facing a skeptical and angry group of lawmakers, if she gets her way, most of the grilling will take place behind closed doors.
In a letter from Pierson to Rep. Darrell Issa of California, the Republican chairman of the committee, Pierson said that most of the discussion should take place in a classified briefing not open to the public. She said a comprehensive discussion of Secret Service policies and procedures would require disclosures that are “at the very least law enforcement sensitive and, in some instances, classified.”
“Simply put,” she wrote in the letter, which was obtained by The Times, “publicly airing the very security measures employed by the Secret Service and the various challenges we confront at the White House complex will arm those who desire to cause injury — or worse — to the President and first family.”
She called that, “Beyond reckless.”
But Pierson may not entirely get her way. Members of the committee said Monday that they did not believe Pierson should be able to move the discussion behind closed doors simply to avoid embarrassing details about lapses by her agency.