Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle resigned Tuesday amid bipartisan fury over the agency’s failure to prevent the near-assassination of Donald Trump.
Cheatle, who initially attempted to salvage her position and described herself Monday as the best person to lead the agency despite admitted failures on her watch, revealed her decision in an internal message to Secret Service employees. An agency spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Her announcement follows a grueling hearing Monday before the House Oversight Committee, which featured bipartisan condemnations of her performance and frustration with her inability to answer basic questions about how a gunman was not stopped before firing multiple shots at Trump, injuring him and killing a spectator at a Pennsylvania rally on July 13. Both Democrats and Republicans called for her resignation afterward.
"It is overdue,” Speaker Mike Johnson said moments after learning the news. “She should have done this at least a week ago. I'm happy to see that."
Johnson said the news will not change plans for a bipartisan task force the House announced earlier Tuesday to investigate the shooting.
President Joe Biden issued a statement thanking Cheatle for her service and promising that the investigation into the assassination attempt would continue.
“We all know what happened that day can never happen again,” Biden said.
He said he would appoint a new director “soon.”
Cheatle worked in the Secret Service for nearly three decades before a stint in the private sector, helming security for PepsiCo. Biden named her director of the Secret Service in 2022. In her time there, she emphasized the importance of workforce diversity, including efforts to recruit more women to the agency.
Some conservative commentators blamed those efforts for the agency’s failure to keep Trump from getting shot, but people close to the former president — including his son Eric Trump and his former national security adviser Robert O’Brien — have praised its female agents.
The Secret Service’s mission requires perfection. And in recent years, it has failed to meet that standard in multiple high-profile episodes. During Barack Obama’s presidency, a person jumped the White House fence undetected and entered the building. Another person fired a gun at the White House. The agency faced scorching criticism for the security breaches, which could have resulted in injury or worse.
The agency again drew opprobrium after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. One of its protectees, then-Vice President Mike Pence, almost ran into a group of rioters in the building. Another, then-Vice President-elect Kamala Harris, was evacuated from the Democratic National Committee headquarters after a bomb was discovered outside the building. And some have questioned how the agency shared intelligence before the attack with its law enforcement partners.
House Oversight Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) said Cheatle's resignation stemmed directly from her performance at the hearing Monday, when she struggled to answer members’ questions and often seemed evasive.
“The Oversight Committee’s hearing resulted in Secret Service Director Cheatle’s resignation and there will be more accountability to come,” Comer said in a statement.
Cheatle insisted at the hearing that she'd moved quickly to make adjustments in security for protectees following the shooting. She also said she'd beefed up security for Harris after she became a presidential candidate Sunday following Biden's announcement that he would exit the race.
But lawmakers faulted her for what they said were false or misleading claims from the agency that it had not turned down requests from Trump's team or agents for added security resources.
While members of the oversight panel were excoriating Cheatle at the hearing Monday, other lawmakers toured the site in western Pennsylvania where Trump was shot and a rallygoer killed.
Cheatle also got pounded there by lawmakers who called for her to step down or be fired. Members of the House Homeland Security Committee said they readily walked on the roof the shooter fired from despite the director's claim in an interview that the roof was too steep for agents to be positioned on.
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