white house residence which is where president trump was when this happened, according to officials. now, officials say nobody this intruder there was no contact between the intruder and president trump. the president was alerted to the incident taking place and the secret service were then able to arrest this man without further incident. again, clearly no gunshots fired, nothing very loud because nobody found out about this until cnn reported it first and broke the news earlier this morning. so, the secret service arrested this man, they have done a search of that backpack. inside they apparently haven t found anything hazardous. the big question now, what was the point of this? was this for fun for this intruder to jump the fence and see how close he could get to the white house or something more sinister? was this perhaps a dry run for some event in the future? these are things that the secret service is now investigating.
p.m., an individual scaled the outer perimeter fence by the treasury building. so the picture you re looking at right now, that would be all the way to the left of the picture outside of the camera shot there. by treasury building, east executive avenue, secret service individuals arrested the individual on the south grounds, did not make it inside the white house buildings, by that statement. a backpack carried by the individual was searched. there was nothing inside that they called a hazardous material. following established protocols that we ve been talking about, north and southbound sides were searched and nothing was found. secretary john kelly was briefed. and the president who was at home at the white house at 11:30 or 11:40 when it happened was briefed last night about this intruder as well. a little more on the individual who was arrested. it does not say whether it was a man or a woman in this statement.
on the grounds many times. again, coming on the south side of the white house. yeah, i think one of the questions really is just how strict do we want to make security around the white house? one of the nice things about the white house to many people is that the public can get pretty close to it and that is, i thinker perceived that it is the people s house. do you, for example, expand the fence from where it is now further out as was done previously in the 1990s? those are the kind of questions i think that have to be balanced but security by its nature is always a balance. there s a freedom and there s the need for security restrictions. yeah, okay, thank you so much for that. since that s your beat i wanted to get your thought on that. eliza to you now, on what we ve been talking about for the other part of the last past hour. and that s healthcare. and as you saw, the vice president and he was out there
you can have small arms, of course, the secret service can defeat one man with small arms. but an intruder getting in the other side is biological weapons or chemical weapons. then you can contaminate an area. i don t think the president was in danger. i don t think that s true. i think the secret service is correct about that. but cautionary. they have got to fix this. stand by, kelly o donnell is still at the white house. sorry to interrupt you again. she s got a statement for us i want to bring into the conversation. kelly what do you have? reporter: we said a statement was imminent and we now have it. this is from the united states secret service. i m going to read you the full statement so our audience can have all the facts here. on march 10th, 2017, at approximately 11:38 p.m. an individual scaled the outer perimeter fence by the treasury building. as our audience is watching that, that is on the left side of the white house as we see it on the screen about a block hal
here. back to jim let s bring in republican chairman congressman dent. you ve been following the story with us throughout the last half hour or so. your reaction to this latest piece of information coming from the secret service, as well as the other reporting coming from kelly o donnell? well, thank you richard for having me on the program. yeah, i guess we re all very much disturbed and alarmed by the fact that the white house was once again breached. it appears that somebody scaled the fence over by the east wing of the white house. this is going to be a subject of investigation. i m pleased that they apprehended the individual and it appears the individual was not a threat to the president or anyone in the white house. that said, this has happened too often. i m sure the committee of homeland security will take this up and we ll have hearings on the latest breach. one of the questions that came from jim cavanaugh who you heard from, an msnbc analyst here, he said this is up t