WASHINGTON — Julia Pierson resigned under
pressure as director of the Secret Service on
Wednesday after failing to quell a bipartisan
political furor over repeated breaches of White
House security and losing the confidence of the
president her agency is charged with protecting.

Ms. Pierson’s support in the West Wing began
crumbling late Tuesday, in large part because she
did not tell the White House of a security failure in
Atlanta last month when an armed man was allowed
to ride in an elevator with President Obama at the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Despite meeting with the president last week, Ms.
Pierson informed him about the incident only
minutes before it was reported in the news media
on Tuesday evening, officials said.
Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, said
Ms. Pierson’s delay in telling the president was a
crucial part of “recent and accumulating reports
about the performance of the agency” that led Mr.
Obama to conclude that the Secret Service needed
new leadership.

After Ms. Pierson appeared at a brutal congressional
hearing on Tuesday, when she had to explain to a
House panel how an armed intruder jumped the
White House fence on Sept. 19 and made it as far
into the mansion as the East Room, she woke
Wednesday to mounting calls for her resignation
and withering criticism, some of it from Democrats.

By noon, Speaker John A. Boehner and
Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the
House’s top Democrat, had both called for
independent inquiries into the security missteps,
including the Secret Service’s response to a 2011
incident in which a man shot seven high-powered
bullets into the south facade of the White House.

But Ms. Pierson was already on her way out. In a
meeting Wednesday morning with Jeh C. Johnson,
the secretary of the Department of Homeland
Security — which oversees the Secret Service — she
offered her resignation, and he accepted it.

In a statement, Mr. Johnson said he had appointed
Joseph Clancy, a former Secret Service agent in
charge of the Presidential Protective Division, to
become acting director. Mr. Johnson also bowed to
demands for an outside inquiry and said he would
appoint a “distinguished panel of independent
experts” to report recommendations by Dec. 15.

For Ms. Pierson, the resignation ended a tumultuous
two weeks that started when Omar J. Gonzalez, 42,
an Iraq war veteran, evaded capture as he jumped
the White House fence, ran across the North Lawn,
barged through the unlocked door of the North
Portico and knocked down an agent as he sprinted
through the Entrance Hall to the Cross Hall to the
East Room, the site of presidential news conferences
and other formal events.

The outrage about the failure to stop Mr. Gonzalez
escalated with news reports that law enforcement
officers had previously encountered him, armed and
with a map of the White House. Anger intensified
after The Washington Post reported that the Secret
Service had misled the public about how far Mr.
Gonzalez got inside the White House. Initial reports
by the Secret Service gave the impression that Mr.
Gonzalez had been stopped just inside the North
Portico.

But the tipping point, according to Mr. Earnest,
came Tuesday night, when The Washington
Examiner reported the incident in Atlanta. Law
enforcement officials later confirmed that Secret
Service officials were initially unaware that the
private security guard riding in the elevator with Mr.
Obama was armed. They discovered his weapon,
they said, after he took pictures of the president and
acting unprofessionally.

Officials said the Secret Service quickly began to
investigate the incident. Hours after it occurred, on
Sept. 16, senior agents met at the agency’s Atlanta
field office to start an “after action review” to
determine what had occurred and how it could be
prevented in the future.

But the agency did not immediately inform anyone
at the White House, Mr. Earnest said, and Ms.
Pierson did not bring up the incident during an Oval
Office meeting with Mr. Obama on Sept. 24, which
had been arranged to discuss the fence-jumping
case.

“I think if there’s a serious breach of the president’s
security, that we would anticipate that, at a
minimum, that White House officials would be
informed in a timely fashion,” Mr. Earnest said.
Ms. Pierson also did not bring up the incident during
several hours of testimony before the House panel
on Tuesday. In an exchange with Representative
Jason Chaffetz, Republican of Utah, Ms. Pierson said
that she had briefed Mr. Obama about only one
incident involving his safety in 2014 — the case
involving Mr. Gonzalez.

“So the only time you’ve briefed the president on
perimeter security, the president’s personal
security, the first family’s security, has been one
time in 2014,” Mr. Chaffetz said.
“That’s correct,” she replied, just hours before news
reports broke about the Atlanta incident.

Ms. Pierson had not been Mr. Obama’s first choice to
lead the Secret Service when he appointed her 18
months ago, according to several law enforcement
officials. As the White House searched in 2013 for a
new director to replace Mark Sullivan, who was
retiring, White House officials first offered the job to
David O’Connor, a longtime agency official who had
recently taken a job as the head of global security
for Bain Capital.

But despite making the offer to Mr. O’Connor, who
was known as “the dean of discipline” during his
time at the Secret Service, the White House
continued to examine his background. Officials
uncovered an incident in the mid-1990s in which he
had been accused — and ultimately cleared by the
Secret Service — of using a racial slur. Mr. O’Connor,
who decided against taking the job, declined to
comment.

Ms. Pierson, 55, a 30-year veteran of the agency who
became director in 2013, took over after a Secret
Service prostitution scandal in Cartagena, Colombia,
the year before.

On Wednesday, the intruder who jumped the White
House fence, Mr. Gonzalez, pleaded not guilty to
charges of unlawfully entering a restricted
government building while carrying a weapon,
carrying a dangerous weapon in public and
unlawfully possessing ammunition. The judge ruled
that Mr. Gonzalez would remain in detention until
another hearing on Oct. 21.

Representative Elijah E. Cummings, Democrat of
Maryland, commended Ms. Pierson on Wednesday
for stepping down, saying the move was in the best
interest of the Secret Service and the president. But
he said more change was necessary, including,
possibly, more resignations.

“I don’t want us, after she’s left, to say to ourselves
that everything is resolved,” Mr. Cummings said.
“Clearly there was a culture there that was not
healthy.”

In a brief interview with Del Quentin Wilber, a
reporter for Bloomberg News, Ms. Pierson said that
she had resigned because “Congress has lost
confidence in my ability to run the agency,”
according to a Twitter message from Mr. Wilber
shortly after the resignation was announced.
Mr. Wilber also wrote that Ms. Pierson said: “I can be
pretty stoic about all this, but not really. It’s painful
to leave.”


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