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Another Guest Crashed White House Dinner

MICHELE NORRIS, host:

That state dinner at the White House continues to make news for the wrong reasons. It turns out that Tareq and Michaele Salahi were not the only people to crash the dinner. The Secret Service has confirmed that another uninvited guest got into the White House, as NPR's Don Gonyea reports.

DON GONYEA: There was already a criminal investigation underway involving the Salahi's very unwelcome and very much photographed visit to the White House. But today, the Secret Service says the investigation into the slip-up has revealed that another person made it to the state dinner without an invite. The individual's identity has not been released, but in a statement, the Secret Service says it appears that the subject traveled from a local hotel where the official Indian delegation was staying. There was a security sweep there with the entire delegation handled by the State Department, then that delegation and the uninvited guest boarded a bus that took them all to the White House.

The Secret Service says there's nothing to indicate that this individual had contact with the president or first lady. So far there are no pictures. It is also not clear at this point if the person had any direct connection to the official delegation from India. The Secret Service says it will have no further comment because of the ongoing criminal investigation since the state dinner security procedures for all White House events have been enhanced.

Don Gonyea, NPR News, Washington. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

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You're most likely to find NPR's Don Gonyea on the road, in some battleground state looking for voters to sit with him at the local lunch spot, the VFW or union hall, at a campaign rally, or at their kitchen tables to tell him what's on their minds. Through countless such conversations over the course of the year, he gets a ground-level view of American elections. Gonyea is NPR's National Political Correspondent, a position he has held since 2010. His reports can be heard on all NPR News programs and at NPR.org. To hear his sound-rich stories is akin to riding in the passenger seat of his rental car, traveling through Iowa or South Carolina or Michigan or wherever, right along with him.