After Salahis Crashed White House Party, Secret Service to Be More Vigilant

The White House is expecting thousands of guests in the coming weeks for holiday parties just as probes into how aspiring reality TV stars Tareq and Michaele Salahi crashed President Obama's state dinner are heating up inside the Secret Service and on Capitol Hill.

"The Secret Service will not hesitate to check, double check and triple check the guest list for the upcoming receptions just to make sure the Secret Service and the White House are on the same page," Special Agent Darrin Blackford, a Secret Service spokesman, told me on Monday.

I also bet White House Social Secretary Desiree Rogers will have personnel on the ground by the East Wing guest entrance in order to work more closely with the Secret Service to avoid any more uninvited party crashers.

Meanwhile, Rogers was asked Monday to testify about the incident at a Thursday hearing of the House Homeland Security Committee. The White House declined comment on Rogers invitation to testify at the hearing or if she will appear. Committee chairman Rep. Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.) sent Rogers a letter asking her to appear before his panel, approving a request by Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.), the ranking Republican on the committee. King told me Monday that he wanted to question Rogers about why she did not assign staffers at the East Wing White House entrance to help make sure only invited guests were admitted to the party.

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs was peppered with questions at Monday's briefing about how the couple slipped though various checkpoints last Tuesday night and found themselves in a receiving line with President Obama, the First Lady and the Prime Minister of India and his wife. The White House has asked for a total review of how the couple could penetrate one of the most guarded buildings in the nation and have their pictures taken with the Obamas, Vice President Biden and White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel.

The Secret Service and congressional inquiries come as the Obama White House prepares for the heaviest weeks yet of entertaining, with nights of holiday season parties for supporters, members of Congress, friends, and yes, the press, to mark Christmas, Hanukkah and the New Year.

There's a party Thursday night at the White House that will include some of Obama's friends from Illinois. Members of Congress are invited on Dec. 7. The White House declined to release the number of parties being hosted by the Obamas for the holiday season. The White House apparently is sensitive about all the parties, even though it is traditional for presidents to host a string of them.

On Friday, the Secret Service took the blame for the security breach, saying the Salahis should have been stopped at the first checkpoint when their names could not be found on the invitation list.

The Secret Service said the breach was their fault and not that of White House Social Secretary Desiree Rogers, who told AP she did not post staffers at the East Wing entrance to deal with any issues with guests arriving for the first state dinner hosted by the Obamas.

"There was no call made to the Social Office.We did not call the Social Office to check the list," said the Secret Service's Blackford.

The drill from last Tuesday night whereby guests for parties enter the White House through the East Wing and then go through security at the entrance before proceeding to the party- is standard for East Wing events.

Despite the Secret Service taking the blame, questions about the role of Rogers' Social Office remain.

Gibbs, at today's briefing, was asked whether there should be any determination if Rogers office "made mistakes as well." The gist of a string of questions put to Gibbs was this: if Rogers had posted an aide at the guest line checking off names, would Salahis have been caught?

Gibbs was pressed on this point, and was asked again: "At previous dinners there was somebody from the social secretary's office who was checking names. That's not really the responsibility of the Secret Service, is it?"

Gibbs said, "I assume in the absence of somebody being there, because they're working telephones in the White House, somebody would have checked. That again, I think the focus of the investigation at this point is on the fact that that name wasn't on a list, that name wasn't "waved" in, but that that couple got into the White House. And I think that's what the Secret Service is rightly focused on in their security investigation."