A security member of the Secret Service approaches the North Portico of the White House in Washington on Monday, Sept. 29, 2014.WASHINGTON – The intruder who climbed a fence made it farther inside the White House than the Secret Service has publicly acknowledged, a Republican congressman said Monday. The disclosures came on the eve of a congressional oversight hearing with the director of the embattled agency assigned to protect the president’s life.
Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, who chairs a House subcommittee on national security oversight, said whistleblowers had informed his panel that Omar J. Gonzalez had made it far beyond the front doors of the White House, despite what the Secret Service had said in the hours after the incident. Chaffetz criticized the Secret Service and its leadership for not doing more to stop the suspect earlier.
“I have deep concerns that the president is not as safe as we want and need him to be,” Chaffetz said on CNN.
In the hours after the Sept. 19 fence-jumper incident, Secret Service spokesman Ed Donovan told The Associated Press that the suspect had been apprehended just inside the North Portico doors of the White House. The Secret Service also said that night that the suspect had been unarmed – an assertion that was revealed to be false the next day when officials acknowledged Gonzalez had a knife with him when he was apprehended.
Senate Judiciary Committee staffers who were briefed about the investigation by the administration a week after the incident were never told that Gonzalez had made it deep into the building, said a congressional official who wasn’t authorized to discuss the investigation and requested anonymity. The official said the committee later was told that the suspect had, indeed, made it far beyond the front door.