On Friday, a man carrying a backpack jumped the fence to the White House and was intercepted by Secret Service agents. That man now faces ten years in prison.
Jonathan Tran, 26, climbed the White House fence on Friday. In his backpack, among other things, were cans of mace, a passport, a laptop, a book written by President Donald Trump, and a letter he had written to Trump. When arrested by Secret Service, Tran told them:
“I am a friend of the president. I have an appointment.”
CNN reports the Secret Service officer Wayne Azevedo found the letter in Tran’s belongings, which mentioned:
“Russian hackers and said he had information of relevance. Tran alleged that he had been followed, and his ‘phone and email communications (had been) read by third parties,’ and that he had ‘been called schizophrenic.'”
After being briefed on the attempted breach, Trump commented during a meeting with Cabinet officials that:
“The service did a fantastic job. It was a troubled person. It was very sad.”
Tran is being charged with “entering or remaining in restricted grounds while carrying a dangerous weapon.” The maximum penalty for the crime is ten years. Tran’s brother, Brian, told CNN that his brother has been troubled after being laid off from an electrical engineering job. He said that Tran had been:
“…Living in his car and eating junk food… [he is] stressed out from the job.“
Johnathon Wachrow, a former Secret Service agent, weighed in with CNN as well:
“This is really troubling… If someone came over the northwest fence of the Treasury complex, what that indicates is they didn’t go over just one fence, they went over multiple fences. This has the potential to be a catastrophic breach of the White House complex. This is really disturbing, just the amount of real estate that this intruder was able to gain or bypass on the complex… So the Secret Service has to really take a very hard look very quickly as to why weren’t other defense measures alerted.”
CBS Los Angeles had a report on the incident. Watch it below:
Featured Image via YouTube Screenshot
