SECRET SERVICE

Secret Service Director Julia Pierson Is in the Hot Seat (NBC News)

When President Obama appointed her the new director of the Secret Service a year and a half ago, hopes were high that Julia Pierson could redeem the agency's tarnished reputation.

“Julia is eminently qualified to lead the agency that not only safeguards Americans at major events and secures our financial system, but also protects our leaders and our first families, including my own,” Obama said in a statement in March 2013, when Pierson was sworn in as the first female director of the Secret Service in its nearly 150-year history.

Now Pierson, 55, is coming under fire for botching the assignment Obama had called out: protecting the first family. The law enforcement veteran with more than 30 years of experience with the Secret Service is being grilled Tuesday by Congress after a series of major mistakes by her agents, including a White House break-in on Sept. 19 by an Iraq war vet who hopped the fence and made it into the East Room with a knife before he was tackled and disarmed.