WaPo reports:
A security contractor with a gun and three convictions for assault and battery was allowed on an elevator with President Obama during a Sept. 16 trip to Atlanta, violating Secret Service protocols, according to three people familiar with the incident.
Obama was not told about the lapse in his security, these people said. The Secret Service director, Julia Pierson, asked a top agency manager to look into the matter but did not refer it to an investigative unit that was created to review violations of protocol and standards, according to two people familiar with the handling of the case who spoke on the condition of anonymity....
The elevator incident exposed a breakdown in Secret Service protocols designed to keep the president safe from strangers when he travels to events outside the White House.
Under a security measure called the Arm’s Reach Program, Secret Service advance staffers run potential event staff members, contractors, hotel employees, invited guests and volunteers through several databases, including a national criminal information registry, and records kept by the CIA, the National Security Agency and the Defense Department, among others. Anyone who is found to have a criminal history, mental illness or other indications of risk is barred from entry.
The incident occurred at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention when Obama came there to talk about the U.S. response to the Ebola crisis. The man was detained after Obama left the elevator, and questioned, and they then learned about his criminal history. The man's supervisor arrived and the man was fired and told to hand over his gun, stunning the Secret Service agents, who hadn't realized up to that point that he was armed.
To top it off, there's Politico's outrageous take on the whole clusterf*uck.
Josh Marshall at TPM sums up how they cover the story:
All of which is to say that on this topic Kessler [writer of the Politico article] is simultaneously a genuine expert and a bit of a kook.
So here's the kicker at the end of the piece.
Agents tell me it’s a miracle an assassination has not already occurred. Sadly, given Obama’s colossal lack of management judgment, that calamity may be the only catalyst that will reform the Secret Service.
Read that a few times.
So Obama is at fault for his inevitable assassination, or he's the only thing standing in the way of cleaning up the agency responsible for his inevitable assassination.There's a lot packed into that two sentence flourish. But all of it is deeply f'd up.
All of this is really getting well over the line of any kind of normality. WTF is going on?
* * *
UPDATE:
Politico has now revised the outrageous statement at the end of their story from yesterday and added an explanatory note ("What? Us? How could you possibly think we meant what we just explicitly said?"):
Agents tell me it’s a miracle an assassination has not already occurred. In typical Washington fashion, nothing gets reformed until a disaster happens. If anything unites Republicans and Democrats, it is that nobody wants to see a tragedy: We all just want the Secret Service fixed.
Editor’s note: Some readers have misinterpreted the original last line of Kessler’s article as somehow suggesting that the president should be held responsible in the event of his own assassination. That couldn't be further from the truth, and we’re sorry if anyone interpreted Kessler’s meaning in any other way.
Not "We're sorry we published this BS in the first place" but "We're sorry you're so clueless that you misinterpreted it."
Keep up that fine record of "journalism," Politico.
