Updated: Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle Resigns

DHSgov, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

UPDATES Tuesday, 23July24 10:35am

The AP is reporting that Secret Service Director Cheatle has resigned:

The director of the Secret Service is stepping down from her job following the assassination attempt against former President Donald Trump that unleashed intensifying outcry about how the agency tasked with protecting current and former presidents could fail in its core mission.

Kimberly Cheatle had served as Secret Service director since August 2022.

Cheatle announced her departure in an email she sent to staff. Cheatle had been facing growing calls to resign and several investigations into how the shooter was able to get so close to the Republican presidential nominee at an outdoor campaign rally in Pennsylvania.

Original Post:
However bad you might have heard Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle’s testimony before an unamused House Oversight Committee went, it was probably worse.

Washington Post:

“This is the most significant operational failure of the Secret Service in decades,” she said in opening remarks. “I take full responsibility for any security lapse of our agency.”

Cheatle, who was sworn in as director on Sept. 17, 2022, has said she will not resign. She is the Secret Service’s 27th director and the second woman to lead the agency.

She has spent more than 25 years in the Secret Service in various roles, including running the Atlanta office and then becoming assistant director of the Office of Protective Operations, the first woman in that role. Cheatle served on Biden’s protective detail when he was vice president.

The lawmakers questioned why Trump was allowed to take the podium about 15 minutes after officers at the fairgrounds in Butler sighted a suspicious individual, later identified as the 20-year-old gunman, Thomas Matthew Crooks.

Crooks gained access to an unsecured roof less than 150 yards from the stage of Trump’s campaign rally, from which he opened fire with an AR-style rifle, injuring Trump, killing one man in the crowd and seriously wounding two others. He was killed at the scene by a Secret Service countersniper.

Under repeated questioning Monday by Rep. Jake LaTurner (R-Kan.), Cheatle confirmed that the Beaver County emergency services unit noticed Crooks on the roof and photographed him nearly 20 minutes before Trump took the stage.

Cheatle also confirmed that Crooks arrived at the rally with a range finder, a tool used to gauge outdoor distances for use in photography, surveying and shooting. But she said that a “range finder is not a prohibited item” and that carrying one did not necessarily make him a threat.

LaTurner replied: “If that same individual with the range finder is found on a rooftop, is that still just suspicious, or is that considered threatening?”

“That could be termed still as suspicious,” she said.

Cheatle sought to make a distinction between suspicious behavior and a direct threat, saying the Secret Service would have “paused the rally had they known there was an actual threat.”

The elite agency’s failure to grasp the threat worried lawmakers in both parties, who said the agency’s 60-day internal investigation would take too long to deliver answers.

“I think you need to reflect,” Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), one of several Democrats calling for Cheatle to resign, told her. “You cannot go leading a Secret Service agency when there is an assassination attempt on a presidential candidate.”

Secret Service director Kimberly A. Cheatle answers questions during a House oversight committee hearing. (Valerie Plesch for The Washington Post)
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) told Cheatle that 60 days is “not acceptable.”

“It has been 10 days since an assassination attempt on a former president of the United States regardless of party,” Ocasio-Cortez told Cheatle. “There need to be answers.”

The internal report is in addition to the FBI’s criminal investigation and other probes of the attack.