Obama: Secret Service required new leadership

Secret Service director Julia Pierson resigned yesterday in the face of multiple revelations about bumbling in her agency and rapidly eroding confidence that the president and his family were being kept safe.

President Barack Obama “concluded new leadership of that agency was required”, said White House spokesman Josh Earnest.

Throughout the day, high-ranking politicians from both parties had urged her to step down after her poorly received testimony to Congress a day earlier — and revelation of another security problem: Obama had shared an elevator in Atlanta last month with an armed guard who was not authorised to be around him.