Skip to 9:50 of the clip below and stick with it for a few minutes. This is the same security breach that Ed wrote about this morning, the one involving an ex-con, employed at the time as a security guard by a contractor at the CDC, riding an elevator with O and behaving oddly — with a gun on his hip, somehow unbeknownst to the Secret Service. That was September 16th. According to Josh Earnest, the White House itself was finally told about the incident just 24 hours ago, shortly before the Examiner dropped its bombshell about what happened. Presumably, if not for the fact that the story was about to explode in the media, the agency never would have briefed Obama at all. They would have covered it up, just like they apparently covered up what happened three years ago when some nut fired a bunch of shots into the White House’s second-story facade. I’m tempted to make an “Obama found out what happened on the news again” joke but these people hiding information from their boss about potential threats to his life isn’t funny.

And yet, Julia Pierson would have you believe she’s the victim of an insatiable media.

“I think it’s in the best interest of the Secret Service and the American public if I step down,” Pierson said in an interview with Bloomberg News after her resignation was announced by the Department of Homeland Security. “Congress has lost confidence in my ability to run the agency. The media has made it clear that this is what they expected.”…

“I’m disappointed that I didn’t have an opportunity to implement structural and operational changes in the agency,” Pierson said. “I had a vision for the future. It’s 31 years of service and a firm understanding of the organization.”

Pierson said she spoke to Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson at his office today.

“We met in person and after that discussion I felt this was the noble thing to do,” she said, because it would “take pressure off the organization.”

Help me understand the timeline here. Yesterday the president finds out that, oh yeah, a former criminal with a gun somehow ended up on the same elevator with him and, oh yeah, the Secret Service forgot to mention it to him until about five minutes before the story blew up in the press. Then, this morning, as Ed pointed out in his post, Josh Earnest goes on MSNBC and defends Pierson, as if the White House is prepared to stand by her. Then, a few hours later, Earnest holds this presser and lets it be known that the president himself is a victim of a Secret Service cover-up. If all of this is true, why didn’t O fire her on the spot yesterday when he found out about the CDC incident? Failing that, why did Earnest defend her in the media? The theory, I guess, is that they wanted her out since yesterday but wanted to give her a chance to do it on her terms, so that Secret Service personnel don’t feel like she was pushed, but … given the circumstances, everyone’s going to conclude that she was pushed anyway, right? If she had any real shame or remorse about all of these embarrassments, she would have quit before yesterday’s congressional hearing. She was there to try to save her job. Oh well.