April D. Ryan

 
VIDEO: Alleged crasher enters W.H.
By: Kiki Ryan and Eamon Javers
January 4, 2010 08:48 PM EST

Neither the Secret Service nor the White House will confirm the identity of the third state dinner crasher, but videotape appears to confirm that D.C. party promoter Carlos Allen, 39, arrived at the North Portico of the White House in the same State Department van that delivered members of the Indian delegation for the gala event.

Pool cameras at the event captured a man who appears to be Allen, dressed in a tuxedo, exiting the van and stepping up the stairs leading to the front door of the White House, one of the most closely guarded spaces in official Washington. In the video, Allen turns to look over his left shoulder before entering the Executive Mansion. The alleged crasher’s entrance came just minutes before President Barack Obama and the first lady stood in the same spot to greet the prime minister of India and his wife.

In an interview with POLITICO Monday, Allen denied having attended the state dinner. “I did not attend the state dinner,” Allen, the CEO of Hush Society magazine, repeated three times.

 
But on Tuesday, Allen’s attorney, A. Scott Bolden, said that in fact Allen had attended the dinner, and that he “received an invitation.”

“He doesn’t deny being at the dinner,” Bolden said. “He has been cooperating with the Secret Service and their investigation. He has been interviewed and has been forthright and truthful with them.” Bolden said Allen is not a gatecrasher, and is “not connected” to the Salahis.

 
Bolden, an attorney at Reed Smith LLP in Washington, said that Allen stayed at the event for dinner and the entertainment, and that he is now sharing information with the Secret Service and cooperating with the White House. Bolden also said that Allen has produced an invitation to the state dinner that Bolden has seen. Bolden says the document - which he declined to show POLITICO - appears to be legitimate.

Allen is apparently socially connected to Michaele Salahi, the socialite who was accused of crashing the Nov. 24 state dinner at the White House with her husband, Tareq Salahi.

 
In a picture posted on one of Allen’s websites, Hushgalleria.com, Allen poses with a woman who appears to be Michaele Salahi at an event the website lists as “Paul Gardner’s Beyonce After Party Event.” A second woman in the picture is unidentified. No date for the event or other details are immediately available.

Paul W. Gardner is the name of the Salahis’ lawyer, who allegedly was involved with a series of e-mails to a Pentagon official in an attempt to get the Salahis invited to the state dinner. The woman who appears to be Michaele Salahi also shows up in a picture on the Hush Galleria site with Carlos Allen’s business partner, Bryan Silver. Two other Hush employees have been identified in pictures on the Salahis’ Facebook page.

A congressional source identified Allen as the latest gate crasher at the dinner in a Washington Post report on Monday evening.

Although Allen denied the report, Nicole Almodovar, the 2009 Miss Maryland Galaxy, said that Allen told her otherwise.

“Yes, he told me he went and that he had a good time,” Almadovar told POLITICO on Monday. Almodovar claims this conversation occurred at a Nov. 25 Thanksgiving food drive hosted by Allen’s magazine.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about; I don’t know why people are saying that,” Allen responded, when asked about the alleged conversation.

 
According to a public records database search, Allen owns the home at 3102 18th St. N.W. that serves as the registered address of Hush Group. The D.C. license of Hush Group itself, however, has been revoked, according to the D.C. Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs, for failure to file a two-year report for 2008 that names corporate officers and lists other business details. The firm was first registered in 2005. Allen is a registered Democrat.

 
Meanwhile, the former head of the Secret Service said that the agency knew about a third White House dinner crasher soon after news broke in November that a Virginia couple had made it past security - but that the Secret Service waited until now, nearly six weeks after the event, to reveal the information.

“It was not something they wanted to go public,” the former director, Ralph Basham, said in an interview with POLITICO.

The Secret Service declined to comment. The agency came under heavy criticism for allowing Tareq and Michaele Salahi into the Nov. 24 dinner for the prime minister of India, even though they were not cleared to attend the event.

In a cached version of the Facebook page that appears to belong to Allen, he lists famous figures he is a fan of - including Michaele Salahi.

Basham said the agency learned that there had been a third unauthorized attendee “a couple of days after the Salahi case.”

But in the case of the third gate crasher, Basham laid the blame for the incident squarely at the feet of the State Department, whose Office of Protocol appears to have escorted the individual onto the White House grounds in a van along with members of the Indian government delegation.

“The State Department has a responsibility to ensure that any person they are escorting into the White House is a legitimate guest,” Basham said. “They need to step up here and take some responsibility.”

State Department spokesman Ian Kelly said in a briefing with reporters today, “This is now a matter that’s under investigation. It’s a very serious ongoing criminal investigation.”

Asked whether there were any additional crashers at the Nov. 24 dinner, Basham said, “At this point, it would be impossible to tell.”

 
In a press release Monday afternoon, the Secret Service said the third crasher traveled from a local hotel at which the official Indian delegation was staying and arrived at the dinner with the group, which was under the responsibility of the State Department. The person went through “all required security measures” along with the rest of the official delegation at the hotel and boarded a bus or a van with the delegation guests to go to the White House. The Secret Service did not identify the third individual.

“At present, there is nothing to indicate that this individual went through the receiving line or had contact with the president or first lady,” the Secret Service said. The release did not say whether this third person was questioned or charged. A spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Washington declined to comment. Potential charges in a case such as this, said a knowledgeable source, include trespassing, unlawful entry and lying to a federal official.

The Secret Service release noted that unlike the rest of the members of the official delegation, the third individual was not entered into the White House’s WAVES visitor screening system. And it says that procedural changes have already been implemented to address foreign delegations under the responsibility of the Department of State that are entering facilities secured by the Secret Service.

The press release confirmed reporting by author Ronald Kessler earlier in the day on Newsmax.com. Kessler is the author of “In the President’s Secret Service,” in which he argues that budget and workload constraints have led the Secret Service to begin “cutting corners” in presidential security.

In a story posted at 10:26 a.m., Kessler wrote that that the Secret Service re-examined video of arriving guests at the Indian dinner and attempted to match the images with the guest list. “The agency spotted an African-American man wearing a tuxedo who had not been invited,” Kessler wrote.

“He appeared to be with members of the Indian delegation. Checking further, agents found that a State Department official had picked him up, along with others from the Indian delegation, at the Willard InterContinental Hotel and had driven him from the hotel to the White House.”

Basham said the crasher’s appearance at the hotel indicates a degree of advance planning for the event, which he thinks was simply an attempt to get into the most exclusive party in the city, not to harm the president. “Do you walk around the Willard in a tux, unless you’re planning something?” he said. “Gate crashers who want notoriety don’t pose a threat to the president or the first lady, but it is disturbing that he was able to get into the White House under the auspices of the State Department.”

And Basham said the Secret Service deploys several layers of security, so that even if someone is able to get on the grounds they wouldn’t necessarily be able to harm the president. “You still have agents and uniformed officers right near the president. You have layers of security so one point does not represent a total failure,” Basham said.

© 2009 Capitol News Company, LLC

President Obama met with Department heads handling issues of intelligence in order to plug the holes found after the failed Christmas Day terrorist attack.

After a meeting to discuss the ongoing reviews of the attempted terrorist attack on Christmas Day, the President spoke to the press and the American people about what his Administration is doing to keep America safe.

THE PRESIDENT: Good afternoon, everybody. I just concluded a meeting with members of my national security team, including those from our intelligence, homeland security and law enforcement agencies involved in the security reviews that I ordered after the failed attack on Christmas Day.
I called these leaders to the White House because we face a challenge of the utmost urgency. As we saw on Christmas, al Qaeda and its extremist allies will stop at nothing in their efforts to kill Americans. And we are determined not only to thwart those plans, but to disrupt, dismantle and defeat their networks once and for all.

Indeed, over the past year, we’ve taken the fight to al Qaeda and its allies wherever they plot and train, be it in Afghanistan and Pakistan, in Yemen and Somalia, or in other countries around the world.

Here at home, our intelligence, homeland security and law enforcement agencies have worked together with considerable success: gathering intelligence, stitching it together, and making arrests — from Denver to Texas, from Illinois to New York — disrupting plots and saving American lives. And these successes have not come without a price, as we saw last week in the loss of our courageous CIA officers in Afghanistan.
But when a suspected terrorist is able to board a plane with explosives on Christmas Day the system has failed in a potentially disastrous way. And it’s my responsibility to find out why, and to correct that failure so that we can prevent such attacks in the future.
And that’s why, shortly after the attempted bombing over Detroit, I ordered two reviews. I directed Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano to review aviation screening, technology and procedures. She briefed me on her initial findings today, and I’m pleased that this review is drawing on the best science and technology, including the expertise of Secretary of Energy Steven Chu and his department.

I also directed my counterterrorism and homeland security advisor John Brennan to lead a thorough review into our terrorist watch-listing system so we can fix what went wrong. As we discussed today, this ongoing review continues to reveal more about the human and systemic failures that almost cost nearly 300 lives. We will make a summary of this preliminary report public within the next few days, but let me share some of what we know so far.

As I described over the weekend, elements of our intelligence community knew that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab had traveled to Yemen and joined up with extremists there. It now turns out that our intelligence community knew of other red flags — that al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula sought to strike not only American targets in Yemen, but the United States itself. And we had information that this group was working with an individual who was known — who we now know was in fact the individual involved in the Christmas attack.
The bottom line is this: The U.S. government had sufficient information to have uncovered this plot and potentially disrupt the Christmas Day attack. But our intelligence community failed to connect those dots, which would have placed the suspect on the “no fly” list.
In other words, this was not a failure to collect intelligence; it was a failure to integrate and understand the intelligence that we already had. The information was there. Agencies and analysts who needed it had access to it. And our professionals were trained to look for it and to bring it all together.

Now, I will accept that intelligence, by its nature, is imperfect, but it is increasingly clear that intelligence was not fully analyzed or fully leveraged. That’s not acceptable, and I will not tolerate it. Time and again, we’ve learned that quickly piecing together information and taking swift action is critical to staying one step ahead of a nimble adversary.
So we have to do better — and we will do better. And we have to do it quickly. American lives are on the line. So I made it clear today to my team: I want our initial reviews completed this week. I want specific recommendations for corrective actions to fix what went wrong. I want those reforms implemented immediately, so that this doesn’t happen again and so we can prevent future attacks. And I know that every member of my team that I met with today understands the urgency of getting this right. And I appreciate that each of them took responsibility for the shortfalls within their own agencies.
Immediately after the attack, I ordered concrete steps to protect the American people: new screening and security for all flights, domestic and international; more explosive detection teams at airports; more air marshals on flights; and deepening cooperation with international partners.
In recent days, we’ve taken additional steps to improve security. Counterterrorism officials have reviewed and updated our terrorist watch list system, including adding more individuals to the “no fly” list. And while our review has found that our watch-listing system is not broken, the failure to add Abdulmutallab to the “no fly” list shows that this system needs to be strengthened.

The State Department is now requiring embassies and consulates to include current visa information in their warning on individuals with terrorist or suspected terrorist connections. As of yesterday, the Transportation Security Administration, or TSA, is requiring enhanced screening for passengers flying into the United States from, or flying through, nations on our list of state sponsors of terrorism, or other countries of interest. And in the days ahead, I will announce further steps to disrupt attacks, including better integration of information and enhanced passenger screening for air travel.
Finally, some have suggested that the events on Christmas Day should cause us to revisit the decision to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay. So let me be clear. It was always our intent to transfer detainees to other countries only under conditions that provide assurances that our security is being protected.

With respect to Yemen in particular, there’s an ongoing security situation which we have been confronting for some time, along with our Yemeni partner. Given the unsettled situation, I’ve spoken to the Attorney General and we’ve agreed that we will not be transferring additional detainees back to Yemen at this time.
But make no mistake: We will close Guantanamo prison, which has damaged our national security interests and become a tremendous recruiting tool for al Qaeda. In fact, that was an explicit rationale for the formation of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. And, as I’ve always said, we will do so — we will close the prison in a manner that keeps the American people safe and secure.

Our reviews — and the steps that we’ve taken and will continue to take — go to the heart of the kind of intelligence and homeland security we need in the 21st century. Just as al Qaeda and its allies are constantly evolving and adapting their efforts to strike us, we have to constantly adapt and evolve to defeat them, because as we saw on Christmas, the margin for error is slim and the consequences of failure can be catastrophic.
As these violent extremists pursue new havens, we intend to target al Qaeda wherever they take root, forging new partnerships to deny them sanctuary, as we are doing currently with the government in Yemen. As our adversaries seek new recruits, we’ll constantly review and rapidly update our intelligence and our institutions. As they refine our tactics, we’ll enhance our defenses, including smarter screening and security at airports, and investing in the technologies that might have detected the kind of explosives used on Christmas.
In short, we need our intelligence, homeland security and law enforcement systems — and the people in them — to be accountable and to work as intended: collecting, sharing, integrating, analyzing, and acting on intelligence as quickly and effectively as possible to save innocent lives — not just most of the time, but all the time. That’s what the American people deserve. As President, that’s exactly what I will demand.

Thank you very much.