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The White House once again suffered an embarrassing security breach over the weekend when a 4-year-old toddler squeezed through the bars of the fence along the building’s north lawn and ended up on presidential property.
Secret Service agents raced out the White House door on Sunday afternoon with guns drawn after they received reports of yet another security breach.
The Secret Service is once again under investigation, this time over allegations that two agents drove a government car into White House security barricades after drinking at a late-night party last week, the Washington Post reported.
Officers who witnessed the incident wanted to arrest the agents and conduct sobriety tests, but a supervisor let the agents go home.
The Obama administration is investigating the allegations. One of the agents involved in the March 4 incident is a top member of President Obama’s protective detail. Secret Service spokesman Brian Leary confirmed the investigation with the Post, saying the agency was “aware of the allegations of misconduct involving two of our employees.”
Leary didn’t specify what the focus of the inquiry was, but told the news outlet that the incident was reported to the White House and Secret Service Director Joseph P. Clancy, and is being investigated by the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general.
An off-duty Department of Defense employee trying out his friend’s drone from an apartment is responsible for flying the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) over White House grounds, The New York Times reported.
While the drone was airborne, the US government worker – who had reportedly been drinking – lost control of it. He texted his friends, telling them he thought the drone might have crashed onto the White House grounds, and fell asleep. He woke up the next day to find out that his fear had turned out to be reality.
President Barack Obama has acknowledged that federal laws for unmanned aerial vehicles – or drones – lag behind the technology readily available to consumers. His remarks came hours after a small UAV was found to have crashed on White House grounds.
"We don't yet have the legal structures and the architecture both globally and within individual countries to manage them the way that we need to," Obama told CNN, adding that his administration "is seeing if we can start providing some sort of framework that ensures that we get the good and minimize the bad."
What is described as a small drone was found on White House grounds on Monday morning. President Obama and the First Lady are on a trip to India. The Security Service is looking for the perpetrators.
White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest confirmed that “a device” has been found. "The early indications are that it does not pose any sort of ongoing threat to anybody at the White House," he said.
The Secret Service announced that one of the agents saw and heard a two-foot-wide "quadcopter" fly at a low altitude over the premises about 3 am local time.
The US Secret Service told four top officials they must leave their positions, as the agency tries to recover from a string of embarrassing security failures. The shuffle comes after a critical report said the agency is “starved for leadership.”
The four senior management officials were reportedly told they could resign, retire, or report for a new assignment with the Secret Service or the Department of Homeland Security, the Washington Post reported, citing “people familiar with internal discussions."
A fifth individual has also decided to resign, the newspaper stated.
Outside the nation’s capital, it's not highly trained Secret Service agents who drive the vehicles at the tail end of the presidential motorcade. Instead, volunteers with no training or security clearance shuttle around administration staff and the press.
Natalie Tyson, a 24-year-old San Francisco-area graduate student, drove a van in the motorcade when President Barack Obama arrived in the City by the Bay for a fundraiser this fall. She and other volunteers serve as “a link in the middle of the fastest, and highest-profile, chain of vehicles in the country,” the New York Times reported.
