Bomb threat, another intrusion on White House grounds

DEBKAfile was founded by a team of journalists in June 2000 as an independent Internet Web site, providing an intelligence and security news service. March 19, 2017, 8:58 AM (IDT)

Two security-related incidents took place at the White House in Washington on Saturday. First, a man parked his car next to the fence and then jumped into the grounds from the car’s roof. He was arrested by Secret Service agents. Then, at night, another man was arrested outside the gates after he drove up and said that he had a bomb in his vehicle. The incidents followed an intrusion on March 10 in which a man scaled a fence on the east side of the complex and walked around for 17 minutes, as well as tried to open several doors, until he was caught. Neither he nor the intruder on Saturday was carrying a weapon, but they each had a letter that they wanted to give to President Donald Trump. Rep. Jason Chaffetz, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said in an interview regarding the earlier intrusion that it is “unbelievable” that someone was “able to get up close to the White House and spend 17 minutes before he’s apprehended”, even though the US spends “billions of dollars on personnel and dogs and technologies and fences and undercover people and video surveillance”.

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