Monitoring Desk: White House briefing room evacuated due to terror threat.
Press returning to briefing room at White House pic.twitter.com/TA4gUmoEfw
— Linsey Davis (@LinseyDavis) June 9, 2015
The White House press room had been evacuated in the middle of a daily press briefing but Media persons were allowed to came back after 10 minutes.
Secret Service agents instructed those in the room to leave and sniffer dogs were brought in to carry out checks.
Those evacuated were taken to another building on the White House complex. Social media is claiming that a phone threat caused evacuation of briefing room for terrorism threat.
According to 69 News, the Senate building was later given the all clear and there’s no sign of whether the two events were connected. Reporters were allowed back into the briefing room roughly a half hour after the evacuation began. The TSA hearing was called by the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee in response to a report that was leaked revealing significant flaws in the agency’s terror-vetting process.
According to a CNN report, cracks in the system included TSA failing to identify 73 active workers who had links to terrorism. Witnesses at the hearing on Tuesday included: U.S. Department of Homeland Security Inspector General John Roth, Director of Transportation Security and Coast Guard Issues Jennifer Grover, Federal Air Marshal Robert J. MacLean and Assistant Federal Security Director for the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport Rebecca Roering. All the witnesses voiced concern over both systematic errors and agency moral. Other issues TSA was criticized for included the increased use of pre-check without the proper vetting, the emphasis from certain executives for efficiency over security, and the large vulnerabilities that can occur over simple human error mistakes. “
