White House intruder pleads guilty
Details of the Secret Service lapse during the 2014 incident are revealed at trial.
WASHINGTON — On a warm, late summer evening last year, Omar Gonzalez parked his car near the White House and took his two dogs for a walk.
Over the next hour, he walked around the perimeter of the executive mansion. He’d been preoccupied with the building, authorities said, since he’d returned home from an Army tour in Iraq, where he was wounded.
Eventually, Gonzalez stopped at a fence. He scaled it, ran past uniformed Secret Service agents and, according to court documents, barged through the White House doors as an agent attempted to close them.
“Let me in!” Gonzalez shouted. He managed to run inside before he was finally subdued.
The details of the Sept. 19 intrusion that prompted an internal inquiry at the Secret Service and added to a string of embarrassing incidents for the agency were presented in federal court Friday as Gonzalez pleaded guilty to two federal offenses.
The charges — unlawfully entering a restricted building while carrying a dangerous weapon and assaulting, resisting or impeding certain officers — each carry a maximum punishment of 10 years in prison. But the plea agreement reached between Gonzalez and the government calls for a term of 12 to 18 months, after which he would be put on supervised release. A final sentence will come after a June 8 hearing.
During Friday’s hearing, Gonzalez agreed that he had ignored repeated orders from Secret Service agents to stop as he ran toward and into the White House, before he was tackled near the East Room. Agents discovered a folding knife with a 3 1⁄2 -inch serrated blade in his pocket. He told interviewers he wanted to tell President Obama that “the atmosphere was collapsing.”
A search of Gonzalez’s vehicle turned up hundreds of rounds of ammunition, two hatchets and a machete.
Gonzalez, 43, wearing an orange jumpsuit, gave brief, tentative responses to the judge Friday, at one point saying he was taking prescription medication. Family members have said that Gonzalez, an Army combat veteran, was wounded by a roadside bomb in Iraq and struggled with depression and post-traumatic stress disorder after returning to Texas.
Gonzalez’s appearance in court comes amid a new scandal for the Secret Service: accusations that two top agents drove into a bomb investigation scene on White House grounds after a night of drinking and that a supervisor who wanted them to submit to sobriety tests was overruled. The agents drove very close to a suspicious package, which was feared to be a bomb but turned out to be a book, the Washington Post reported.
Obama remains confident in the agency and its director, Joseph Clancy, who assumed the post permanently in February after months as the interim chief, a White House spokesman said this week. But members of Congress expressed concern over whether new leadership was enough.
“The fact that this event involved senior-level agents is not only embarrassing but exhibits a clear lack of judgment in a potentially dangerous situation,” Republican Rep. Jason Chaffetz of Utah, the chairman of the House Oversight Committee, and Rep. Elijah E. Cummings of Maryland, the panel’s top Democrat, said in a joint statement.