Under the pressure of the political outcry about the series of security breaches that have happened at the White House and around the person of the US President in the last few months, Julia Pierson has decided to resign her function as the Director of the United States Secret Service.
The support for Julia Pierson, a long time official of the Secret Service, has started to crumble after an incident that involved an armed person entering the same elevator as President Barack Obama. The details of the incident were not revealed, but it was ultimately found out about. The last drop in the glass was the recent incident involving a person carrying a knife that has climbed over the walls of the White House, running through the lawn, dodging Secret Service agents and almost reaching the presidential suite.
After this incident director Julia Pierson was in for a lot of criticism, and was questioned in front of the House about this series of issues. She seems to have had trouble coping with the pressure, and after a brutal hearing and the building up of voices calling for her departure, she has resigned. Jeh J. Johnson, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, has accepted Pierson’s resignation, and appointed Joseph Clancy, a former agent of the Secret Service, as the leader of the Presidential Protection Division. Besides, Johnson has bowed to the public pressure and declared to appoint a panel of independent experts to evaluate the security slips of the past few years, expecting a report and recommendations mid-December.
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Julia Pierson has been involved with the Department of Homeland Security for three decades. She became the director of the Secret Service in 2013, after a scandal involving “ladies of the evening” in Cartagena, Colombia. She was not the first choice of the President, though – it was David O’Connor, a long time Secret Service official, who was dropped out because of an accusation of a “racial slur” in his past.