Lawmakers grilled the director of the US Secret Service, Kimberly Cheatle, during a contentious House hearing on Monday, where members of both parties called for her resignation in the wake of the assassination attempt against Donald Trump earlier this month.
In her opening statement, Cheatle acknowledged the Secret Service had “failed” on 13 July, when a 20-year-old gunman was able to take a clear shot at the former president from a rooftop near Trump’s campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.
Trump survived but sustained an injury to his ear, and one rally attendee, former fire chief Corey Comperatore, was killed in the attack. Two others were injured.
“As the director of the United States Secret Service, I take full responsibility for any security lapse of our agency,” Cheatle told the House oversight committee. “We are fully cooperating with ongoing investigations. We must learn what happened, and I will move heaven and earth to ensure that an incident like July 13th does not happen again.”
In a particularly damning moment, Cheatle acknowledged that Secret Service agents were informed of a suspicious individual at the Trump rally “somewhere between two and five times” before the gunman opened fire.
The Republican chair of the committee, James Comer, mourned the assassination attempt as “a horrifying moment in American history” and demanded that Cheatle offer her resignation.
“While we give overwhelming thanks to the individual Secret Service agents who did their jobs under immense pressure, this tragedy was preventable,” Comer said. “It is my firm belief, Director Cheatle, that you should resign.”
Lawmakers repeatedly pressed Cheatle on how such a galling security lapse could have occurred, but the director dodged many of their questions, reminding members that the investigation of the shooting was still in its earliest stages. When Cheatle again told Comer that she could not specify how many Secret Service agents were assigned to Trump on the day of the shooting, the congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene interjected: “Why are you here?”
Cheatle did deny allegations that the Secret Service rejected the Trump campaign’s demands for additional security on 13 July, telling lawmakers: “The assets that were requested for that day were given.”
But Cheatle became more vague when the Republican congressman Jim Jordan pressed her on whether the Secret Service had denied past requests for additional security at Trump campaign events.
“It looks like you won’t answer some pretty basic questions,” Jordan said. “And you cut corners when it came to protecting one of the most important individuals, one of the most well-known individuals on the planet.”
Some Republicans representatives grew openly combative as they questioned Cheatle, with Nancy Mace telling the director: “You’re full of shit today.”
Democratic members joined in on the criticism, and at least two of them, Jamie Raskin and Ro Khanna, echoed Republicans’ calls for Cheatle’s resignation. Khanna compared the situation to the fallout after an assassination attempt against Ronald Reagan in 1981.The then Secret Service director, Stuart Knight. stepped down in the months after the Reagan shooting.
“Do you really believe that the majority of this country has confidence in you right now?” Khanna asked.
Cheatle replied: “I believe that the country deserves answers, and I am committed to finding those answers and providing those answers.”
Asked when more answers might be available, Cheatle said the agency hoped to conclude its internal investigation in 60 days, a timeline that sparked censure from committee members.
“The notion of a report coming out in 60 days when the threat environment is so high in the United States, irrespective of party, is not acceptable,” said the progressive congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. “This is not theater. This is not about jockeying. This is about the safety of some of the most highly targeted and valued targets – internationally and domestically – in the United States of America.”
Raskin, the Democratic ranking member of the oversight committee, agreed with calls for accountability at the Secret Service while adding that lawmakers must reckon with the broader problem of gun violence in the US. He noted that the Trump campaign rally attack was not even the deadliest shooting on 13 July, as four people were killed later that day after a gunman opened fire at an Alabama night club.
“What happened in Butler, Pennsylvania, was a double failure: the failure by the Secret Service to properly protect Donald Trump and the failure of Congress to properly protect our people from criminal gun violence,” Raskin said. “We must, therefore, also ask hard questions about whether our laws are making it too easy for potential assassins and criminals to obtain firearms generally and AR-15 assault weapons specifically.”
With Republicans in control of the House, it seems unlikely that a gun safety bill will pass Congress anytime soon. And after Cheatle’s performance on Monday, it seems even less likely that she will be able to hold on to her job for much longer.
