Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle resigned Tuesday amid bipartisan outrage over her agency’s failure to stop a 20-year-old gunman from opening fire on former President Donald Trump during a campaign rally.
Cheatle’s departure came after a congressional hearing in which she offered minimal new information about the July 13 assassination attempt in western Pennsylvania, which marked the Secret Service’s most stunning failure since President Ronald Reagan was shot in 1981.
The director vowed to get to the bottom of what she acknowledged was a colossal security lapse, but lawmakers on both sides of the aisle said her assurances didn’t inspire confidence and urged her to step down.
Cheatle in an internal email told employees she was resigning “with a heavy heart,” saying she didn’t want calls for her to quit to become a distraction. “The scrutiny over the last week has been intense and will continue to remain as our operational tempo increases,” she wrote. “However, this incident does not define us.”
Cheatle’s hearing performance “was awful. It was all secret and no service,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin (D., Md.), the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee who had joined Republicans in calling for her resignation. “She answered none of the questions that the American people have.”
The committee’s chairman, Rep. James Comer (R., Ky.), said “there will be more accountability to come.”
“The Secret Service has a no-fail mission yet it failed historically on Director Cheatle’s watch,” he said.
President Biden thanked Cheatle for her decades of service and said he planned to appoint a new director soon. “As a leader, it takes honor, courage and incredible integrity to take full responsibility for an organization tasked with one of the most challenging jobs in public service,” the president said.
Ronald Rowe, the agency’s deputy director and a 24-year-veteran of the service, will serve as its acting head, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said. Rowe previously led the Secret Service’s legislative affairs and held a top role in the office of protective operations, a division that oversees the work most commonly associated with the agency.
In an interview last week, Rowe defended Cheatle’s leadership and said she shouldn’t resign.
A number of investigations are under way into how Thomas Matthew Crooks fired at least six rounds from the roof of the American Glass Research building roughly 400 feet away from where Trump spoke, killing one spectator, critically injuring two others and leaving Trump with a graze wound to the ear. A Secret Service sniper team shot back, killing Crooks.
Cheatle in her testimony acknowledged that Crooks had been identified as suspicious more than an hour before the shooting. Pressed by lawmakers, she said that Secret Service agents had received several notifications of a person acting suspiciously.
The director declined to elaborate on those communications. She also declined to say how Crooks got on the roof, or whether authorities sought to approach him after he was initially identified as suspicious. In one exchange, she suggested that the security team with Trump before he went on stage didn’t know that the former president was facing an active threat.
Her resignation marks an abrupt and unhappy end to a Secret Service career three decades in the making.
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