Federal law enforcement officials provided answers and apologized March 25 to the thousands of ticket-holders who were excluded from President Obama's inauguration ceremony on Jan. 20 despite waiting in line for hours.
U.S. Secret Service Director Mark Sullivan and U.S. Capitol Police Chief Phillip Morse testified at a Congressional hearing led by Rep. David Price, D-N.C., and Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., the respective chiefs of the House Appropriations Committee's Homeland Security and Legislative Branch subcommittees.
"What was supposed to be a positive experience for my constituents turned into an embittering one," said Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey, D-Wis.
The hearing came days after the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies released a report on the Inauguration. An eight-page summary was made available to the public because of security concerns, according to the committee.
The report found that "flaws and shortcomings in the planning process" led to the turmoil that morning, which left crowds searching for a proper viewing area long after the inauguration ceremony began. Thousands of people were left roaming the streets of downtown D.C. and completely missed the event because much of the National Mall had been secured off.
The executive summary claimed the main cause of the chaos was the people crowding at the ticket entrance gates - many of whom did not hold proper tickets - which resulted in an overwhelming number of people.
"While we expected and planned for almost two million people to descend on the core area of the city, we had no benchmark or historical perspective to forecast the cascading effect this size crowd would have," Morse said.
The National Park Service estimates that 1.8 million people attended the Inauguration, making it the largest gathering in D.C. history.
"The problem was that no one was prepared to handle the number of people that were on the Mall," said Mollie Wein, a junior in the Kogod School of Business, who had a purple ticket but ended up missing the event while she waited in line. "But that's an illegitimate excuse because there were projections and estimates."
The summary made several suggestions to improve the next Inauguration, such as setting up a high-level committee to oversee planning and improve coordination, handing responsibility over to the congressional and presidential inaugural committees for directing and pre-screening ticket-holders and having law enforcement officials monitor social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook to watch for new developments.
Sullivan and Morse both apologized to the ticket-holders who had been turned away while citing the event was largely a success because there were no injuries, arrests or other security issues reported.
"In the end, the logistical impact of the arrival and movement of almost two million visitors served to strain the seamless implementation of our plans," Morse said. "We will work even harder for future events to ensure that everything humanly possible is done to maximize the experience for all who travel to witness history in our nation's capital."
While federal law enforcement officials repeatedly highlighted the day's security successes, several lawmakers remained unsatisfied.
The report did not address why a crowd of people was directed into the Third Street Tunnel below the National Mall and then left there for hours, Wasserman Schultz said.
In an incident known by many as the "Purple Tunnel of Doom," thousands of people with tickets to the purple section of the Mall filed into the tunnel below the area after police directed them there. Some waited nearly five hours underground only to miss the ceremony.
"There's no defending it," Sullivan said. "I believe what happened is that people who got queued up in that line felt that that line was going to lead to the purple gate."
Wasserman Schultz spoke on behalf of Marisa McNee and David Meyer, Democratic political consultants who have been championing Congress and federal law enforcement agencies in search for answers for the thousands of disappointed ticket-holders since the January's Inauguration mishap.
McNee and Meyer criticized the report for not allowing the public more access and involvement in understanding the mistakes and suggested in their statement, read by Wasserman Schultz, that a "judiciously redacted version of the full report" be made available to the public.
"Public participation in the investigation is an asset to those seeking to understand what went wrong; it is crucial that we are allowed to participate in the process," Wasserman Schultz said. "We need more basic factual information to be able to do so."
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