A man in a car with a semiautomatic rifle landed seven shots on the White House in 2011, and Secret Service bosses dismissed the entire incident for four days.
The revelation, which appears in a story in Sunday’s Washington Post, comes a week after a man with a knife was able to jump the White House fence, dash across the North Lawn and run into the unlocked front door of the executive residence before being detained.
In the 2011 case, a man whom the Post described as “troubled” and obsessed with the president, fired a semiautomatic rifle at the executive residence out the door of his Honda Accord as it was parked on a nearby street.
President Obama and the first lady were out of town at the time, though their daughter, Sasha, and the first lady’s mother were in the White House, the Post said.
Secret Service agents guarding the White House recognized the sound of gunfire, feared it had been directed at the residence and began to jump into response mode. But the Post reported that they were overruled by supervisors who said the gunfire nearby had been a mere coincidence.
Four days passed before a member of the White House’s custodial staff found broken window glass and pieces of the building exterior, pointing to shots having been fired at the residence after all.
Adding to the controversy was the poor handling of how the president and first lady were informed of what had happened, the Post said. The first news either of them received came from a White House usher, who mentioned the debris discovery to Michelle Obama, assuming she had already heard about it.
The president and first lady were furious about both the Secret Service’s bumbling and about not having been told sooner about the incident, the Post said.
