Special: White House Security Blunder

GWEN IFILL: Hi, everybody, and welcome to the “Washington Week” Webcast Extra – it’s the second time we did that, Peter – where we pick up where we left off on the weekly broadcast. I’m joined around the table by Peter Baker of The New York Times, Michael Duffy of Time Magazine, John Harwood of CNBC and Carol Leonnig of The Washington Post.

Carol, I want to start by asking you to share with us the rather compelling story of one Oscar Ortega-Hernandez. It’s one of the most interesting stories to arise out of this whole Secret Service mess.

CAROL LEONNIG: Thanks for asking about it.

For months we have been looking into this incident at the Post, because a couple of different agents and officers said to us this one really worried them. This was the time they thought maybe the Secret Service had fallen so far down on the job that they were losing faith in what happened next if they slipped up.

So Oscar Ortega is a – was a 21-year-old troubled kid who was starting to show signs of paranoia. And a lot of young men at that age do – not all of them, but a lot of them, at that age. That’s when it starts. And he was saying that he was Jesus Christ. He started to grow his beard. And he said that Obama was putting GPS chips in children, and he was going to stop him. He described Obama as the devil to his friends.

And he came from Idaho Falls, Idaho, drove his little black Honda Accord 3,000 miles and pulled up his car onto the north side of Constitution Avenue and fired seven shots from a semiautomatic rifle into the residence of the White House.

It took four more days for the Secret Service to realize that the house had been hit, despite a good bit of evidence that it had.

MS. IFILL: How does that happen? How can someone fire a bullet that breaks glass, is lodged in – causes, what, $97,000 worth of damage, and yet no one noticed it, and one of the first daughters was home?

MS. LEONNIG: So the answer I’ve been given multiple times by Secret Service leadership is it was the unthinkable. A guy’s going to, like, have this miracle shot from 750 yards away on Constitution Avenue, across the Ellipse, and actually hit the second floor? No one anticipated that was going to be for real. There was a very cursory investigation that night.

Again, you guys asked about the casual Friday when the president and the first lady are out of town. And they were out of town that night. People were trying to relax. They were about to go off shift. And this cursory investigation they did led to them thinking maybe it was two gangsters shooting each other. They found a wrecked car at the Roosevelt Bridge maybe a few minutes later. It had the AK-47 – forgive me, the knockoff AK-47 in it. And they said, OK, this is one of the gangsters.

But there were a lot of flags throughout that night that indeed the house had been hit and had been the target. And one of the most important to me, in reviewing the records and interviewing people, was Officer Carrie Johnson, a woman on the job maybe seven months. She’s standing under the south portico – I’m sorry, on the south portico, under the Truman balcony. She hears the shots fired. She draws her weapon. She decides to break open the emergency gun box to get a shotgun. She is sure an attack is coming over the knolls. And she hears the sound of debris falling overhead.

And what we have been wondering is why didn’t anybody who was a manager or a supervisor or the lead investigator ask her? She was there. But they didn’t ask her until a bullet was found.

MS. IFILL: But she didn’t volunteer it?

MS. LEONNIG: Well, she had told a lot of her more senior colleagues, but I guess she didn’t go as far up the chain of command as some people wish she had.

MS. IFILL: It’s an amazing story, I have to say. And I just want to point out, even though they weren’t home, the daughters were, and so was the grandmother. So that was not as innocent as –

MS. LEONNIG: The first lady was not happy.

MS. IFILL: I’ll bet.

Peter, I want to talk to you about a story you write this week. It’s about how the U.S. miscalculated, underestimated the ISIS threat and the degree to which the president, now going full bore into trying to degrade and destroy ISIS, could have done this sooner.

MR. BAKER: Yeah. Well, the president, of course, gave an interview last weekend to “60 Minutes,” and he was asked how did we miss this. And he said, well, the director of national intelligence, Jim Clapper, says that the intelligence agencies “misunderestimated,” to use a phrase of his – he didn’t actually use that word.

MS. IFILL: No, I know.

MR. BAKER: And the thing is, that is a correct quote from Jim Clapper, the director of national intelligence. He had said that they did not anticipate how much the Iraqi army would collapse in the face of this new threat. But it ended up angering, I think, some of the people in the intelligence agencies.

It felt like to them the president was making out that they were scapegoats, when they had, in fact, sent, at some point or another, warnings, saying this group – ISIS, ISIL, whatever we’re calling them – is a growing threat and you should pay attention to it. And from their point of view, the policymakers in the White House didn’t pay enough attention to it. Classic Washington finger-pointing. Who’s at fault? We’ve seen this before. But it tells us a little something about how we got from there to hear, in very short order, by the way.

MS. IFILL: I wanted to ask you guys about the 2016 – both sides of the fence. In this case – in one case, Michael, the Bushes – all of a sudden, George W. Bush has resurfaced and has said he’s been trying to urge Jeb Bush to run after all, but he doesn’t like to be pushed around by his big brother. What’s really going on with the Bush brothers?

MR. DUFFY: Well, I’m pretty sure that what’s going on is this. I think that for the five or six years after George W. Bush left office, it was believed inside the Bush family and outside that the brand had been pretty seriously tarnished, and probably a nonstarter for Jeb, who, of course, George Sr. and Barbara had always thought was the one with the gifts.

MS. IFILL: But Barbara was also the one who said he shouldn’t run.

MR. DUFFY: Yeah, but I think that was a bit of a feint. I didn’t quite believe that. And so I didn’t buy that. But I think what’s happened – I’m pretty sure that what’s happened in the last few weeks is that George W., the 43 ^rd president, has come to the conclusion – it goes something like this. What’s the difference if it’s Bush-Clinton-Bush-Obama-Clinton or Bush-Clinton-Bush-Obama-Bush? There’s no difference. It’s two dynasties still on the stage. And so whatever down side there was to electing a third Bush is undercut by the fact that the alternative may be – may well be to electing a Clinton.

Now, he has said something close to that. And I know the father is fairly let’s go Jeb, not surprising.

MS. IFILL: But is Jeb saying let’s go Jeb?

MR. DUFFY: I think Jeb’s probably gone from – I know Jeb has gone from going I really don’t want this, say, a year ago to, when Chris Christie began to (“Quayle” ?), OK, maybe, to now I would say it’s about 60 percent saying, all right, maybe we should look at this. And I think -

MR. HARWOOD: And what about Jeb’s family?

MR. DUFFY: And I think – well, there will be – there will be some remedial work that needs to be done there.

MS. IFILL: (Laughs.)

MR. DUFFY: I suspect – I can see an Oprah appearance maybe sometime in the future. But I think what W., 43, is doing – and I hope I don’t “misunderestimate” this - is I think he now, having had brand uncertainty, believes that the brand - whatever brand problems there might have been or dynastic brand problems are now neutralized, especially with Hillary so all in. And he’s now begun to push him. And, of course, he tweeted something very much like this this week. So that’s the story.

MS. IFILL: I find it very interesting. Talk me into being president. No, no, I don’t want to be president. But if you talk me into it, maybe. I don’t know. I’ll think about it. (Laughter.)

I want to ask you about the other side of the coin, which is the Clintons, the grandfatherly Clintons, whose dynasty has grown with a grandbaby now. You wrote a piece about how resilient Bill Clinton has been in this. And I wonder if that resiliency doesn’t pay off for the Clintons in 2016 as well.

MR. HARWOOD: I think there’s a pretty good chance it will. I think she is a lot more than 60 percent inclined to run in this race. She starts in a stronger position than any non-incumbent I can remember in the last couple of decades, at least. And I think a lot of that is her own standing that she accumulated as a senator and secretary of state.

But a lot of it is the brand that was created by her husband, and her as his partner, that is still incredibly popular with people, especially as we have – we’ve had two unpopular presidents since then. And for a lot of people, the memory of Bill Clinton is, well, that guy got things done and he compromised and the economy was really good and, you know, peace and prosperity. That memory is more appealing to people the further we get from it. Remember, there was a heck of a lot of partisan strife and –

MS. IFILL: I vaguely remember that, yeah. It goes back 15 years.

MR. HARWOOD: Yeah. We all covered that while he was president. So it’s not like everyone loved him so much then. But they – he’s doing pretty well. When the Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll took a reputational test of a bunch of leaders, the two leaders in the poll were Pope Francis and Bill Clinton with the same score.

MS. IFILL: Oh, goodness. (Laughter.) I never thought we’d live to see that day.

MR. BAKER: For different reasons, presumably.

MS. IFILL: For different reasons. Well, one can only hope.

Thank you, everybody.

Stay online. See what our panelists are seeing in our daily “Washington Week” top stories. I also weigh in on my weekly blog on how you reacted to last week’s PBS town hall, “America After Ferguson.” And you did react. All that’s at PBS.org/WashingtonWeek.

And we’ll see you next time on the “Washington Week” Webcast Extra.