MOSCOW, November21 (Sputnik) — Secret Service agents arrested a woman carrying a firearm outside the White House on Thursday evening, just after President Obama had finished making a speech.
The 23-year-old woman “is not cooperating in her interview with authorities, so determining her intentions was proving difficult,” The Washington Post reports Ed Donovan, a Secret Service spokesperson, as saying.
She has been identified as April Lenhart from Michigan, who according to CBS was walking around the north fence of the White House on Pennsylvania Avenue at around 8:30 pm when she was apprehended. A man was with Lenhart at the time of her arrest, but the Post reports that he was frisked, questioned extensively and released at the scene.
A Secret Service source told Fox News that Lenhart, who was carrying a 9-millimeter handgun in a holster, was detected by two plainclothes agents, who notified Uniformed Division officers. According to the report, Lenhart was then arrested for the possession of an unregistered firearm.
CBS News’ White House correspondent Mark Knoller Tweeted that at the time of the arrest, the President had finished his address to the nation on immigration 15 minutes earlier from the White House’s East Room. Knoller added on Friday that a Secret Serviceman said special agents had “spotted a gun in a holster around the woman's waist.”
Obama’s address detailed his executive action on immigration, which will allow almost five million people living in America as undocumented immigrants to register with authorities and avoid deportation. In a speech which was televised by cable news networks and Spanish-language channels, Obama told the illegal aliens, “You can come out of the shadows.”
The arrest of Lenhart is the latest security concern at the White House after a series of incidents in recent months. On Wednesday a man from Iowa was arrested near the White House with a knife, rifle and ammunition in his car. Officials told NBC News that the man, R. J. "Renae" Kapheim, had approached a Secret Service Uniformed Division officer and said that "someone in Iowa told him to drive to the White House."
In recent months two men have managed to scale the White House fence and enter the grounds. One, Omar Gonzalez, made it inside the building as far as the East Room, a source told the Washington Post. Gonzalez, a former US soldier, was armed with a knife, and the episode led to the resignation of Secret Security director Julia Pierson after a congressional enquiry revealed other lapses in security.
