Congressional pressure is mounting on Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle over the attempted assassination of former President Trump this month, with multiple lawmakers calling for her resignation ahead of a hearing before the House Oversight and Accountability Committee on Monday morning.
Republicans have been the most vocal in criticizing Cheatle, with both House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) calling for her to resign.
And in a stunning scene, a group of Republican senators, frustrated over an unclassified telephone briefing, confronted Cheatle at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. They demanded that she answer questions about the shooting. They recorded the public encounter and later distributed it on video.
Some of the criticism has focused on a culture war, with several Republicans pointing the finger at the agency’s diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) practices.
And tensions are further inflamed by the Secret Service’s admission over the weekend that it previously… has rejected some requests from the Trump campaign for increased security, retracting an earlier statement that such claims were “absolutely false.”
There are indications that Democrats are also scrutinizing her leadership. Rep. Brendan Boyle (D-Pa.) was named the first democrat to demand Cheatle’s resignation.
“The evidence that has come to light has shown unacceptable operational failures. I have no confidence in the leadership of the United States Secret Service if Director Cheatle chooses to remain in her position,” Boyle said.
Sen. James Comer (R-Ky.) and the panel’s ranking member, Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), issued a rare joint statement Friday urging Cheatle to appear for Monday’s hearing. Another Democrat on the panel, Rep. Jared Moskowitz (Fla.), said Cheatle should resign if she doesn’t appear.
A Secret Service spokesman confirmed Friday that Cheatle will appear for the hearing Monday, the first in what could be a series of public hearings into the attempted murder and the security lapses that led to it.
The House Committee on Homeland Security also requested her presence at a hearing on Tuesday, and the chairman has promised to create a bipartisan task force with subpoena power to investigate the attack.
Cheatle said in an interview with ABC News last week that she will not resign. In support of her state, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, who himself has faced intense criticism from Republicans and was impeached by the GOP-controlled House — a move quickly rejected by the Democratic-controlled Senate. Mayorkas said he has “100 percent confidence” in Cheatle.
A Secret Service spokesman said Friday that the agency “takes full responsibility for the safety of its protégés” and “pledges full cooperation with Congress, the FBI, and other relevant investigations.”
There were also calls for hearings and demands for answers after the last time a president or former president was nearly assassinated, when then-President Reagan survived an assassination attempt in 1981. Hearings with top officials were held just days after the attack, during which a gunman managed to get close to Reagan in a crowd of reporters as the president left the Washington Hilton Hotel.
However, then-Secret Service Director Stuart Knight was not forced to resign. And the agency was much less willing to take immediate responsibility.
During a Senate hearing in the days after the Reagan attack, the Secret Service’s assistant director for protective operations said the agency “would not have done anything differently,” The New York Times reported at the time. Knight noted that relevant intelligence about the shooter had not been passed to the Secret Service prior to Reagan’s appearance, but also said that a democratic society must balance security concerns with public access to the president.
Cheatle, on the other hand, told CNN last week that if “there are things we need to change about our policies, our procedures or our methods, we certainly will.”
Still, other comments she made have raised eyebrows in Congress.
One of the main reasons for this is that Cheatle said in an interview with ABC News that there were no police officers on the roof where the shooter fired because the “sloping roof” posed a security risk, despite there being other Secret Service snipers on a similarly sloped roof.
Cheatle has also been criticized for the Secret Service’s admission that it turned down several Trump campaign requests for more security, although this was initially denied.
“What we’re hearing from the reports of the requests for additional resources, that they went to the top of the organization, is that she was clearly the one responsible for ensuring the safety of Donald Trump and — and Joe Biden,” House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Turner (R-Ohio) said Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”
Lawmakers are particularly frustrated that they were told at a briefing last week that the shooter, 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, had been declared a suspect nearly an hour before the shooting — and that Trump was allowed to take the stage 10 minutes after the hunt for the shooter began.
The attack not only damaged Trump’s ear, but also killed one attendee at the rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, and seriously injured two others.
Some Republicans, however, are turning their attention to a familiar area of political unrest in light of the assassination attempt: diversity initiatives.
Conservatives have placed particular emphasis on a diversity goal that Cheatle outlined in an interview with CBS last year: The agency must have 30 percent female recruits by 2025.
In response to conservative outrage over DEI initiatives and criticism over the hiring of female agents, Secret Service spokesman Anthony Guglielmi issued a statement last week criticizing “unsubstantiated claims” that agents are unqualified, decrying the “disgusting comments.”
“It is an insult to the women of our agency to suggest that they are unqualified based on gender. Such unsubstantiated claims undermine the professionalism, dedication and expertise of our workforce,” Guglielmi said in the statement.
Trump, in turn, praised the “very brave Secret Service agents” who “ran onto the stage” to protect him and quickly killed the shooter.
“They actually did. They ran on stage,” an unusually emotional Trump said during his convention speech last week. “These are great people at great risk, I can tell you that, and they jumped on top of me so I would be protected. There was blood everywhere, and yet I felt very safe in a way, because I had God on my side.”