A driver crashed a large truck into the White House fence last night. The driver was immediately detained. Police and Secret Service officers protecting the compound found a swastika inside the vehicle.
The crash took place shortly before 10 p.m. Monday north of Lafayette Square, adjacent to the residence complex and the Oval Office of the President of the United States.
The District of Columbia police announced that they would file charges against the driver with the support of the Secret Service, whose director of Communications, Anthony Guglielmi, reported the facts in a pair of tweets.
“No members of the Secret Service or the White House were injured, and the cause and manner of the accident remain under investigation,” Guglielmi said in a first message. “The driver may have intentionally hit the security barriers,” he added in a second text.
Images soon circulating online show a U-Haul rental moving truck, a short distance from the fences in Lafayette Square, starting with force and, at all possible speed, crashing hard into the guardrails. The author of the video assured that it was the second attempt to cross the fences.
WUSA television showed another video showing the truck stopped next to a row of steel bollards, with uniformed law enforcement officers and a dog approaching. A remote-controlled robot opens the back door of the truck.
Finally, a Secret Service agent appears in another image searching the cab of the truck and picking up the swastika and other objects previously spread to the side.
The exteriors of the White House and the nearby Capitol are heavily guarded and protected, especially since the assault on the Congress building on January 6, 2021.
Three months after that insurrection, a car hit two Capitol police officers, killing one of them. The assailant, Noah R. Green, was shot dead after pounced on the uniformed officers with a knife.
Last August, another man, Richard A. York III, drove his car into a barricade near the Capitol, got out of the burning vehicle and fired a gun into the air multiple times before killing himself as police officers approached him.
