Fear for Joe Biden when a man, perhaps armed, was intercepted by the Secret Service as he headed towards the president’s residence in Delaware.
Khai-colored cargo shorts, boots and a fluorescent yellow vest, the man had a gun in his holster and a sign accusing the commander-in-chief of being a “criminal” with various references to the investigations into his son Hunter. «The Bidens are criminals , 20 shell companies?! Where is the laptop?”, we read, according to what was reported by the accompanying journalists. It is not clear whether the man was arrested but he was followed by the Secret Service and removed from the house where the president he was waiting to leave for Washington and then New York for the UN General Assembly.
The Secret Service explained that “the man was demonstrating his constitutional rights and did not represent a danger”, no word on the gun, but it is not the first time that flaws in the security system allow intruders of all kinds to get close to the leaders of the United States. From a harmless child to a man armed with a knife in recent years there have been many episodes of this kind, all at the White House with consequent controversy against the secret service.
The most recent, last April, when a two-year-old boy became the youngest to sneak through the bars of the fence of the presidential residence in Washington and the first since the barrier was raised to 3.96 meters after a series of ‘accidents.
The peak occurred at the time of Barack Obama. A man named Joseph Caputo jumped the fence while the president and family were gathered for Thanksgiving dinner in 2015.
The same year a “small drone” ‘landed’ on a tree in the White House around three in the morning when Obama and his wife Michelle were visiting India. The year before, in September, Omar Gonzalez, armed with a knife, even managed to enter the corridors of the residence, reaching the East Room where he was blocked by an officer. The episode led to the resignation of Julia Pierson, the then number one in the US president’s elite security body, after only 18 months in office.
But a month later yet another intruder, a 23-year-old boy, Dominic Adesanya, crossed the barriers on the north side before being stopped by two police dogs. During Donald Trump’s presidency only one episode is remembered, on March 10, 2017, when a man managed to enter the White House park and remain there for over 16 minutes before being arrested.
