Julia Pierson's lips are sealed, and now, thanks to information revealed about security breaches that happened under her watch, so is the fate of her career as director of Secret Service. Following a series of security breaches, most recently a Sept. 19 White House break-in, Pierson resigned from her position today, Oct. 1.
At a Sept. 30 meeting of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, government officials berated Pierson for these oversights and coverups, calling her leadership "profoundly inadequate," among other things.
Pierson defended herself at the hearing yesterday, saying that the Sept. 19 break-in was not caused by negligence on her agency's part.
"This incident is an operational incident. Although it's being addressed as it's very similar or a side effect of some of the other cultural problems, I looked at as a strict tactical concern . . . Mistakes were made, and the proper protocols were not followed," Pierson said.
However, Pierson's testimony was not well-received, and she resigned today after being urged by high-ranking officials to do so. Yet another security breach was revealed after she testified: President Obama had taken an elevator last month with an armed guard who was not authorized to be near him.
Pierson was berated by the media after reports came out from The Washington Post about the attacks on the White House that her agency had been silent about. When a man broke into the White House on Sept. 19, two weeks ago, Pierson's agency claimed the man was unarmed. It turned out that he had a knife. The agency also said that he had been subdued as soon as he entered the White House, but it was later revealed by a reporter at the Washington Post that he made it into the East Room, deeper into the White House than previously announced.
New intelligence that the Post recently revealed about an earlier attack on the White House showed that when a shooter in 2011 fired shots at the White House, it put President Obama's daughters in danger, and that the Secret Service did not realize shots had been fired until four days later, when housekeeping services noticed broken glass. The Secret Service covered up these details from the Obama administration.
"Today Julia Pierson, the director of the United States Secret Service, offered her resignation, and I accepted it," said Jeh Johnson, the Homeland Security Secretary.
The Washington Post, the newspaper that uncovered these security scandals, was also influential in uncovering the Watergate scandal in the 1970s.
