WASHINGTON—Quietly tiptoeing between the East Room and the Lincoln Bedroom in the dead of night Monday, President Obama once again spent another evening peeking behind the scores of paintings located throughout the White House in hopes of locating a hidden safe or secret passageway, executive branch sources confirmed. “There are so many fancy old paintings in here, one of them just has to be hiding a safe with some cool old valuables in it,” Obama stated while pushing Francis Alexander’s oil portrait of Martin Van Buren to the side in the library before yanking on a first-edition copy of Ulysses S. Grant’s Personal Memoirs in hopes of triggering the bookcase to rotate. “Who knows what kind of stuff I might find? Maybe a bar of gold or a neat old parchment map, or maybe even a skull! There’s got to be something like that in here.” Following an hour of trying combinations of keys on President Truman’s grand piano in hopes of opening a sliding wall panel, Obama reportedly tugged downward on each of the White House’s hundreds of wall sconces before moving on to its presidential busts.

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