Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., on Tuesday peppered Secret Service Director Julia Pierson with tough questions about her agency’s reported mishandling of a 2011 gun attack on the White House that went unnoticed by agents for nearly four days.
Three years ago, Oscar Ortega-Hernandez fired several shots directly at the White House, fleeing immediately from the scene in a getaway car. He was arrested five days later in Indiana, Pa. Last year, he pleaded guilty to destruction of property and to using a firearm during a violent crime. He was sentenced in on March 31, 2014, to 25 years in prison.
But here’s the scary part: The shooter’s actions, the evidence of his assault on the White House, went undetected by Secret Service agents for four days. It wasn’t until a housekeeper at the White House discovered broken glass in a hallway that the Secret Service began to piece together what had happened nearly a week earlier. Officers soon realized they had failed to detect a direct attack on the president’s family residence.
Why didn’t the Secret Service perform a more thorough search of the White House after reports surfaced that a man had shot at the building? Did the Secret Service really believe, as it originally claimed, that the sound of nine shots being fired at the White House was actually a car backfiring (apparently six to eight times in a row) nearby? This is what Gowdy wanted to talk about during a House Oversight hearing Tuesday.
“Can you tell me why a housekeeper found the evidence and your agents did not?” Gowdy asked. “Why not search every inch of the White House? This is just processing a crime scene; this is not high math. Why wasn’t it done?”
“It was not as thorough as it needed to be,” Pierson responded.
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