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Commander bites again: Biden's dog has nipped another Secret Service officer

President Biden's dog Commander takes a walk outside the West Wing on April 29, 2023.
Carolyn Kaster
/
AP
President Biden's dog Commander takes a walk outside the West Wing on April 29, 2023.

President Biden's dog Commander has bitten another Secret Service officer, the most recent in a string of unpleasant encounters between the dog and the people who protect the White House complex.

Secret Service spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said the officer was bitten on Monday evening, and was treated by medical personnel at the White House.

The German shepherd is known to have bitten several agents a total of 10 times between October 2022 and January 2023 — incidents that came to light through a lawsuit filed by conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch.

The White House had said that it was working on "additional leashing protocols and training" for Commander. "As we've noted before, the White House can be a stressful environment for family pets, and the First Family continues to work on ways to help Commander handle the often unpredictable nature of the White House grounds," said Elizabeth Alexander, a spokesperson for first lady Jill Biden.

This is the second Biden dog that has bitten agents. The first was Major, a dog they adopted from a shelter and brought to the White House in 2021. But after a couple of biting incidents, Major was went to live with a family friend in Delaware. The Bidens got Commander as a puppy later that year, in December 2021.

Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Tamara Keith has been a White House correspondent for NPR since 2014 and co-hosts the NPR Politics Podcast, the top political news podcast in America. Keith has chronicled the Trump administration from day one, putting this unorthodox presidency in context for NPR listeners, from early morning tweets to executive orders and investigations. She covered the final two years of the Obama presidency, and during the 2016 presidential campaign she was assigned to cover Hillary Clinton. In 2018, Keith was elected to serve on the board of the White House Correspondents' Association.