Secret Service director Julia Pierson resigns

Julia Pierson has resigned her post as director of the United States Secret Service, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson announced Wednesday.

Joseph Clancy, formerly Special Agent in Charge of the Presidential Protective Division of the Secret Service, will lead the agency on an interim basis.

President Barack Obama spoke with Pierson on Wednesday afternoon “to express his appreciation for her service to the agency and to the country,” White House press secretary Josh Earnest said.

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Pierson offered her resignation because “she believed it was in the best interests of the agency to which she had dedicated her career,” Earnest said. “The secretary agreed with that assessment. The president did as well.”

“Over the last several days, we’ve seen recent and accumulating reports raising questions about the performance of the agency, and the president concluded that new leadership of that agency was required,” Earnest added.

Those reports included mid-September incident in which an armed contractor shared an elevator with the president at the Centers for Disease Control and new details about just how far into the White House an intruder was able to get before being apprehended by an off-duty agent.

Earnest said the White House first learned of the elevator incident on Tuesday afternoon, “shortly before” it was reported by the Washington Examiner and the Washington Post.

(From POLITICO Magazine: Why the Secret Service blew it)

Johnson said he has also asked the Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas and DHS’s general counsel to take control of the investigation into the Sept. 19 fence jumping incident at the White House. The review is due to Johnson by Nov. 1.

The DHS secretary will also appoint “a distinguished panel of independent experts” to study the Sept. 19 incident and related issues. He has not yet named the members of the panel, but the group will be responsible for submitting its assessment and recommendations by Dec. 15.

He will also ask the panel to offer suggestions for new Secret Service directors, including candidates who do not come within the agency. “The security of the White House compound should be the panel’s primary and immediate priority,” he said.

“It is worth repeating that the Secret Service is one of the finest official protection services in the world, consisting of men and women who are highly trained and skilled professionals prepared to put their own lives on the line in a second’s notice for the people they protect,” Johnson said in a statement, noting the agency’s ability to handle complex assignments like the United Nations General Assembly meeting last week in New York. “There is no other protection service in the world that could have done this,” he said.

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Pierson’s resignation comes after a day of intensifying calls for her resignation.

“The more we discover, the clearer it becomes that the Secret Service is beset by a culture of complacency and incompetence,” House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) said in a statement before the announcement. “As such, the president must make a swift determination on whether the agency is being well-served by its current leadership.”

“Problems at the Secret Service pre-date Ms. Pierson’s tenure as director, and her resignation certainly does not resolve them,” Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, said in a statement. The panel, he said, “will continue to examine clear and serious agency failures at the Secret Service that have been exposed. While serious questions surround the Secret Service, Director Pierson served her country with honor and has my gratitude for her efforts.”

Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), the top Democrat on the committee, spoke with Pierson on Wednesday morning to thank her for her three decades of service to the agency. At the time they spoke, Cummings said, he couldn’t tell if Pierson had already decided to resign but “made it clear to her that I felt that one of the things that she had to be able to do was to address the issue of culture” and that if she couldn’t do it, she should step down.

Also “problematic” to him was “that whole idea of having Secret Service agents coming to a member of congress without even telling her what was even going on within the agency,” he said....