Report: Off-duty Secret Service agent tackled White House intruder

The man who was able to scale the White House fence and run though the ground floor of the executive mansion was only detained by an off-duty Secret Service agent who was leaving work, The Washington Post reported Tuesday. 

Suspect Omar Gonzalez, a 42-year-old Iraq war veteran with a folding knife in his pocket, was tackled by an agent working on the security detail for the president’s daughters, individuals familiar with the incident told the paper. The agent happened to be walking through the White House as he was leaving work.

{mosads}White House press secretary Josh Earnest said he was “not in a position to confirm those kind of details” when asked about the report. But Earnest added that he believed it was “in the interest” of the Secret Service to release accurate information about the incident “as soon as possible.”

The revelation is the latest in a series exposing the cascading security failures that allowed Gonzalez to enter the president’s residence.

On Monday, it was revealed that, rather than being tackled immediately, Gonzalez apparently overpowered a female agent, entered the historic East Room that is regularly used for public events and speeches and nearly made it into a small parlor room on the mansion’s southern side before he was detained.

Agents had also reportedly muted an alarm box near the front of the building that would have alerted agents of the intruder.

During testimony on Capitol Hill Tuesday, Secret Service Director Julia Pierson was grilled by lawmakers about the security breach.

Pierson told lawmakers that it was “clear that our security plan was not properly executed.”

“This is unacceptable and I take full responsibility,” Pierson said.

—This story was updated at 1:52 p.m.