United States Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle testifies before the House Oversight and Accountability Committee during a hearing at the Rayburn House Office Building on July 22, 2024 in Washington, DC.
Kent Nishimura | Getty Images
U.S. Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle resigned Tuesday following widespread outrage over how her agency failed to prevent the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump at a Pennsylvania campaign rally earlier this month.
Cheatle’s resignation, as first reported by NBC News citing sources, came a day after she was blasted by members of a House committee at a hearing on the Secret Service’s actions leading up to Trump’s July 13 rally in Butler Township.
At that hearing, Cheatle refused to resign, saying she was the best qualified person to head the Secret Service, which is responsible for protecting the president, vice president, their family members, and leading presidential candidates.
But on Tuesday, Cheatle in a letter wrote to Secret Service staff, “In light of recent events, it is with a heavy heart that, I have made the difficult decision to step down as your Director.”
“The Secret Service’s solemn mission is to protect our nation’s leaders and financial infrastructure. On July 13th, we fell short on that mission,” Cheatle wrote.
“The scrutiny over the last week has been intense and will continue to remain as our operational tempo increases. As your Director, I take full responsibility for the security lapse.”
Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., left, and Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, are seen during the House Oversight and Accountability hearing titled “Oversight of the U.S. Secret Service and the Attempted Assassination of President Donald J. Trump” in Rayburn building on Monday, July 22, 2024. Kimberly Cheatle, director of the U.S. Secret Service, testified.
Tom Williams | CQ-Roll Call, Inc. | Getty Images
The chairman of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, which grilled Cheatle on Monday, in a statement on her resignation said it would not stop the panel’s demand for “more accountability” from the Secret Service.
“The Secret Service has a no-fail mission yet it failed historically on Director Cheatle’s watch,” said Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., the committee’s chairman.
“At yesterday’s Oversight Committee hearing, Director Cheatle instilled no confidence that she has the ability to ensure the Secret Service can meet its protective mission,” Comer said. “While Director Cheatle’s resignation is a step toward accountability, we need a full review of how these security failures happened so that we can prevent them going forward.”
Trump, who is the Republican nominee for president, narrowly avoided being killed in the shooting by 20-year-old gunman Thomas Crooks. One rally attended died in the shooting, and two men were critically injured.
Crooks shot at Trump from the roof of a building about 150 yards from the stage where Trump was speaking.
Rep. Kweisi Mfume (D-MD) gestures to a photograph of the building where Thomas Matthew Crooks fired on former President Donald Trump as United States Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle testifies before the House Oversight and Accountability Committee during a hearing at the Rayburn House Office Building on July 22, 2024 in Washington, DC.
Kent Nishimura | Getty Images
The Secret Service did not extend its security perimeter for the rally to include the complex that included that building, instead leaving it up to local law-enforcement officials to secure that area.
Secret Service agents also allowed Trump to take the stage and begin speaking after receiving a report from local police that a suspicious person had been seen at the event. That person ended up being Crooks, who was killed by a Secret Service sniper after he filed multiple rounds at Trump.
Cheatle was widely mocked after the shooting for rationalizing the decision to not put a law-enforcement sniper on the roof that Crooks climbed up to in view of rally attendees who warned police about what he was doing.
Cheatle in an ABC News interview noted that the roof was sloped at its highest point.
“There’s a safety factor that would be considered there that we wouldn’t
want to put somebody up on a sloped roof,” she told ABC News. “And so, the decision was made to secure the building, from inside.”
This past weekend, the Secret Service admitted that on the heels of the shooting it had incorrectly stated that the agency had not rejected requests from Trump’s campaign for enhanced security for him.
The shooting, the most serious assassination attempt against a U.S. president in more than 40 years, came after the Secret Service was informed of intelligence that Trump was the target of an Iranian assassination plot. Crooks has not been linked to Iran.
The Secret Service in recent years has been the target of criticism for a series of scandals and missteps.
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