Michael and Tareq Salahi didn’t look out of place at Barack Obama’s White House state dinner.
Both smartly dressed and with the confidence of any wealthy socialite, they blagged their way into the state dinner in celebration of Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh’s birthday.
They mingled with the likes of President Obama, Vice-President Joe Biden, Indra Nooyi, the boss of Pepsi, and Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff.
But the couple were in fact wannabe reality TV stars who boasted of their party-crashing antics on Facebook, including posting pictures of themselves.
Michaele Salahi’s Facebook page was updated within hours of the White House dinner. Salahi, posting a photo album named “White House state dinner,” showing herself and her husband posing with the the cream of American higher society.
They never made it to the sit-down dinner but the US Secret Service is now looking into its procedures to see how the couple were able to go unnoticed for as long as they did.
“An initial finding has identified one of our checkpoints that did not follow proper procedures to ensure that the two individuals that were named in the Washington Post story were on the invited guests list,” Agency Spokesman Ed Donovan said.
But he said no was at the dinner was ever in danger. “I want to stress that these individuals went through magnetometers and several other levels of screenings just as all of the guests attending the dinner did,” he said. “We don’t rely on just magnetometers or the level of screenings,” he added.
‘We don’t rely on just magnetometers or the level of screenings – we have our agents with our protectees at all times.’
Hilarious.
