WASHINGTON – Julia Pierson resigned as Secret Service director on Wednesday after just 1½ years on the job following a series of major security lapses by her agency that eroded President Barack Obama’s confidence in her ability to run the agency tasked with protecting him.
Pierson’s abrupt departure – one day after Obama expressed full confidence in her – came as lawmakers from both parties were calling for her ouster after her halting performance during a Tuesday House hearing.
A decisive factor in the president’s change of heart, aides said, was that he only learned from press accounts Tuesday that a private security guard with a gun and criminal history had not been screened and allowed to board an elevator with him last month in Atlanta.
Earlier that day, Pierson, 55, had offered a shifting and incomplete account about how an armed intruder had evaded several layers of White House security two weeks ago and made it through the front door before being tackled by an off-duty agent.
Obama “concluded new leadership of the agency was needed based on recent and accumulating accounts” of performance problems within the agency, White House spokesman Josh Earnest said Wednesday.
Pierson had been installed by Obama in March 2013 as the first female director in the agency’s 148-year history. Her appointment was aimed in part at helping the agency overcome a reputation as a boys’ club following a prostitution scandal the previous year.
But her tenure was rocky and included an embarrassing scandal in March when three agents were sent home from a presidential trip to Europe after one was found passed out drunk in the hallway of Obama’s hotel.
“It had to happen,” Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, one of Pierson’s fiercest critics, said of her departure. “She lost the confidence of the men and women in the Secret Service. The situation was getting worse not better. She wasn’t candid with Congress nor was she sharing vital details with the president.”
Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, who accepted Pierson’s resignation, said Joseph Clancy, a longtime Secret Service veteran who retired in 2011, would replace her on an acting basis as a search for a permanent replacement is conducted.
Clancy, who has been working security in the private sector for the past three years, served as the head of Obama’s first protective detail after he took office in 2009. Clancy was described by associates as someone who understands the demands of the job and commands respect within the 6,700-person agency.
Earnest said an independent panel of security experts will conduct the search, but he did not give a timetable for a decision. The appointment does not require Senate confirmation. Former agency officials said there was no clear successor to Pierson, and some in Congress were pushing the administration to look outside the Secret Service for a replacement.
The agency faces deep morale problems, budget constraints and operational questions as it prepares to ramp up for the 2016 presidential campaign, during which the Secret Service traditionally bolsters its manpower to protect candidates from both political parties during a hectic travel schedule.
“They will certainly consider individuals from outside that agency,” Earnest said of the search team. “They will also offer a recommendation to [Johnson] about whether or not a review of broader issues concerning the Secret Service is necessary.”
A three-decade veteran of the agency who had served as chief of staff to her predecessor, Mark Sullivan, Pierson was described upon taking the top job as a skilled and dedicated manager who had helped oversee a $250 million project to modernize the institution’s communications and data-management networks.
She kept a low profile during her first year on the job but was thrust into the spotlight amid the scandals that broke this year in a series of reports in The Washington Post. The newspaper reported this summer that Sullivan had pulled agents off White House patrols for at least two months in 2011 to protect a personal friend.
The paper also revealed last month that the Secret Service stumbled in its response to a gunman who fired at the White House from beyond the security perimeter while Obama was out of town in November 2011. It took four days for the agency to determine that bullets had struck the building, a finding that came only after a housekeeper discovered bullets on the Truman balcony. Sasha Obama, the president’s younger daughter, was home at the time of the shooting.
The Sept. 19 breach, in which Army veteran Omar Gonzalez leapt over the White House fence and managed to sprint through much of the mansion’s main floor, helped clinch Pierson’s downfall.
The Secret Service initially said Gonzalez, who on Wednesday pleaded not guilty to three federal charges, was unarmed, but it was later revealed he was carrying a knife and had 800 rounds of ammunition in his car. Though the Service said he had been tackled just after entering the White House, The Washington Post revealed earlier this week that he had in fact overpowered a Secret Service officer and made it into the East Room before being tackled by an off-duty agent near the Green Room.
“I wish to God you protected the White House like you protected your reputation here today,” Rep. Stephen Lynch, D-Mass., told Pierson at Tuesday’s congressional hearing.
Pierson told lawmakers that “it is obvious that mistakes were made. I take full responsibility. What happened is unacceptable. It will never happen again.”
On Wednesday, a growing list of Congress members from both sides of the aisle, including Sens. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., and Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., called on her to resign.
Former Secret Service Director Ralph Basham, who also testified at the hearing and spoke with Pierson later that evening, said she had endured “a feeding frenzy.”
“It was very difficult physically and emotionally, and it takes a toll on you. She obviously went through a very difficult day,” said Basham, who oversaw the agency from 2003-2006.
After Johnson accepted her resignation, Pierson spoke with Obama by phone and the president thanked her for her 30 years of service, White House aides said.
In the end, Basham said, the White House and Pierson recognized that the focus on her management and public performance “was becoming a distraction in terms of getting on with the investigation and doing the fact-finding.”
Secret Service failed to get fresh start under Pierson
WASHINGTON – The resignation of Secret Service director Julia Pierson and the launch of a top-to-bottom review of the agency Wednesday are an acknowledgment by President Barack Obama of what he has long denied: that the force charged with protecting him is in deep turmoil and struggling to fulfill its sacred mission.
The 6,700-member agency, long an elite class of skilled professionals who prized their jobs, now suffers from diminished luster and historically high turnover rates. Officers in charge of protecting the White House say they have grown resentful at being belittled by their bosses and routinely forced to work on off days. Some agents who have sworn to take a bullet for the president and his family have little faith in the wisdom or direction of their senior-most leaders.
Those chronic woes have been amplified in recent days by revelations of a string of humiliating security lapses that have raised concerns about the president’s safety and prompted the agency’s biggest crisis since President Ronald Reagan was shot outside the Washington Hilton three decades ago.
Joseph Clancy, a retired agent who served as the head of Obama’s protective detail briefly after the president was first elected, was named to take over on a temporary basis. He will serve as a caretaker while a fuller review is conducted and until a permanent replacement can be found.
“Replacing the director is a good start in the right direction,” said Dan Emmett, a former counter-assault team leader and Secret Service agent. But, he added, “replacing the director will not be effective unless the entire upper management is replaced. Otherwise it will just be business as usual.”
Pierson was elevated to the top spot 18 months ago to put an end to business as usual, after a dozen agents were implicated in a night of carousing with prostitutes in Cartagena, Colombia, on the eve of an official visit by Obama.
But while the administration dubbed Pierson a fresh start and a new direction for the agency, she was a deeply entrenched part of its culture. A 30-year veteran of the agency, Pierson had served as former director Mark Sullivan’s chief of staff and then assistant director before taking over.
Under her watch, the agency continued to suffer from systemic problems that went well beyond the embarrassment of the prostitution scandal.
For instance, staffing shortages have grown so severe that the agency has had to fly in field agents from across the country for two-week temporary details, paying their travel, hotel and per-diem costs.
Pierson also rejected an internal study’s recommendations that the White House have a total of about 100 counter-surveillance officers to patrol the perimeter of the complex. She suggested cutting the recommended number by a third. And Pierson had agreed to shrink key units in the agency, including the number of Uniformed Division officers who guard the White House complex.
In her 18 months in charge, Pierson also became the subject of derision among some lower-level agents for accommodating the White House staff’s wishes for less cumbersome security over the warnings of her tactical teams.
In the spring, Pierson was irate at what she considered the excessive security measures her team had planned for the U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit that Obama hosted this summer, demanding that they dismantle extra layers of fencing and reopen closed streets, according to two agency supervisors.
Supervisors who had mapped out the security plan said they were taken aback when Pierson, who worked during high school at Disney World as a costumed character and park attendant, said: “We need to be more like Disney World. We need to be more friendly, inviting.”
“I respect Pierson’s service, but she hasn’t been on a protective mission in two decades,” said one supervisor who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “She doesn’t know anything about security planning in a post 9/11 world.”
On a presidential trip this past spring to the Netherlands, Pierson told several counter-assault team members stationed at posts in the president’s hotel to move to more remote locations and put their weapons in bags, causing the sharpshooters to worry that their reaction time would be hampered in an emergency.
And this week, Pierson personally ordered that a downtown street be left open near a hotel where Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was staying. Secret Service teams have insisted on the closure for years because Netanyahu is considered one of the most sought-after international targets. But the director agreed to changes because of D.C. Mayor Vincent Gray’s concern that closing the street during an earlier visit caused severe gridlock, a Gray spokesman said.
Pierson was called to a Capitol Hill hearing this week to explain how a man carrying a knife was able to jump the White House fence and then run inside the executive mansion and through much of the main floor before being tackled by an off-duty agent.
Lawmakers also grilled Pierson about a botched investigation of a 2011 shooting at the White House, details of which were first reported by The Washington Post on Sunday. Pierson irritated lawmakers when she said she knew little about the incident, despite having been the agency’s chief of staff at the time, and learned some of the details from The Washington Post’s account.
Shortly after the contentious hearing with lawmakers, came another revelation: On a recent trip to Atlanta, a contract security guard with a gun and a criminal record was allowed in an elevator with Obama.
Making matters worse, neither the president nor Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson was told about it. A senior U.S. official said Johnson was “deeply disappointed” when he learned about the incident. White House officials said it first learned of the breakdown minutes before The Washington Post published the story on its website.
Clancy, who spent much of his career at the Secret Service as a senior agent on the protective detail for President George W. Bush, is not expected to clean house or reform the agency, according to officials briefed on his appointment.
“He’s one of the most genteel guys. It would be very hard to find someone to say something bad about Joe,” said one longtime agent who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the news media.
But, the agent added: “He doesn’t like conflict. They need to clean house. He’s not the guy to do it. “
Jon Adler, president of the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association, called Clancy “a solid professional to the core.”
“Joe is an honorable battle tested leader, and I expect his level of commitment and professionalism will have a positive contagion impact on the workforce,” Adler said.
Johnson has tasked his deputy, Alejandro Mayorkas, with taking control of the Secret Service’s in-house inquiry of the Sept. 19 fence-jumping incident. That move is part of an effort by Johnson to assert more control over the service, which has remained noticeably independent since becoming part of DHS a decade ago.
“By December 15, 2014, this panel will submit to me its own assessment and recommendations concerning security of the White House compound,” Johnson said in a statement.
