Disgruntled ex-IRS employee shot outside White House

Law enforcement officers shot and wounded an armed former Internal Revenue Service employee outside the White House Wednesday. Law enforcement officials identified the wounded man as Robert Pickett, 47, of Evansville, Ind. Secret Service spokesman Marc Connolly said nobody else was injured, and the gunman never was inside the White House fence. Last week, Pickett sent a letter to the IRS accusing the agency of covering up whistleblower allegations he made and improperly firing him from his job as an auditor in the mid-1980s.

Shortly after 11:30 a.m., Secret Service agents and District of Columbia police surrounded the White House in a sudden security clampdown after reports of shots being fired.

Connolly said law officers fired one shot at the gunman, striking him in the right knee, and no shots were fired by the man during his encounter with police.

However, law enforcement officers were investigating whether the man fired shots before police approached him outside the south White House fence. The man was taken to nearby George Washington University Hospital.

President Bush was reported safe in the White House, exercising at the time of the incident, while Vice President Cheney was working in his office.

Pickett was fired from his IRS job because his supervisors "said he wasn't doing his job properly and having trouble with attendance," Joseph Yocum, an Evansville attorney, told the Associated Press. Yocum represented Pickett in his appeal of the dismissal.

Pickett lost the appeal and later acted as his own attorney in a suit against the IRS alleging the agency violated his constitutional rights in the firing. In late January, Pickett said in his letter, a federal district court in Cincinnati rejected his lawsuit.

"I have been a victim of a corrupt government," Pickett wrote. The letter was addressed to the IRS commissioner, President Bush, the U.S. Attorney General, Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., Rep. John Hostettler, R-Ind. and the Evansville Courier-Press.

"I tried to protect the citizens from what I thought was an abnormality, an incompetent manager," Pickett wrote. He accused the IRS of being a "corrupt civil service, which has placed itself above the law."