President Obama met Tuesday with the new acting director of the Secret Service as the White House worked to finalize the panel that will investigate a series of security breaches.
Obama met with Joseph Clancy, who was named the interim director after the resignation of Julia Pierson last week, before departing the White House for a series of fundraisers in New York.
{mosads}Clancy had retired from the Secret Service — where he served as head of the division tasked with protecting the president — in 2011 to take over as the director of corporate security at Comcast.
But the administration recruited him to return to the agency after mounting criticism over the breaches, which in the past month included a man successfully scaling the White House fence and entering the executive mansion and another incident where a man with a gun rode an elevator with the president despite not having been cleared to do so.
Clancy will helm the agency until a permanent replacement is found, but the White House hopes the expert panel to be named this week will assist in that process.
“Once [the] review is completed and briefed to an outside panel of experts, I think they are going to be looking at the agency, the leadership there, and the attractive qualities that will be sought after in a new director,” White House spokesman Eric Schultz said last week.
Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said the results of the review are expected in December.