Congressional pressure is mounting on Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle over the assassination attempt on former President Trump, with several lawmakers calling for her resignation ahead of a Monday morning hearing with the Oversight Committee of the Chamber.
Republicans have been the most vocal in criticizing Cheatle; House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) demanded that she resign.
And in a stunning scene, a group of Republican senators who were frustrated with an unclassified telephone briefing confronted Cheatle at the Republican National Convention (RNC) in Milwaukee, demanding that she answer questions about the shooting — filming and later distributing the public meeting.
Some of the criticism has veered into culture war battles, with several Republicans pointing fingers at the agency’s diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) practices.
And to further aggravate tensions is the Secret Service’s acknowledgment over the weekend that there had already been denied some requests from the Trump campaign to bolster security, walking back a previous statement that such claims were “absolutely false.”
There are indications that Democrats are also examining their leadership. Rep. Brendan Boyle (D-Pa.) on Saturday became the first democrat to call for Cheatle’s resignation.
“The evidence that has emerged has shown unacceptable operational failures. I have no confidence in the leadership of the United States Secret Service if Director Cheatle decides to remain in her role,” Boyle said.
Oversight Chairman Jamie Comer (R-Ky.) and the panel’s ranking member, Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), issued a rare joint statement Friday urging Cheatle to attend Monday’s hearing. Another Democrat on the panel, Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-Florida), said Cheatle should resign if she doesn’t show up.
A Secret Service spokesman confirmed Friday that Cheatle will appear at Monday’s hearing, the first in what could be a series of public hearings into the assassination attempt and the security failures that enabled it.
The House Homeland Security Committee also requested his presence at a hearing on Tuesday, and the House speaker promised to create a bipartisan “task force” with subpoena authority to examine the attack.
Cheatle said in an interview with ABC News last week that he will not resign. Supporting him is Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, who faced intense criticism from Republicans and was impeached by the GOP-controlled House — which the Democratic-controlled Senate quickly rejected. Mayorkas said he has “100 percent confidence” in Cheatle.
A Secret Service spokesperson said Friday that the agency “is fully responsible for the safety of its protectees” and pledges “full cooperation with Congress, the FBI and other relevant investigations.”
Requests for hearings and demands for answers also followed the last danger in the life of a president or former president, when then-President Reagan survived an assassination attempt in 1981. Hearings with senior officials were held just days after the attack , in which an armed man was able to approach Reagan in a crowd of journalists as the president left the Washington Hilton Hotel.
The then director of the Secret Service, Stuart Knight, however, was not forced to leave his position. And the agency was much less willing to take immediate responsibility.
During a Senate hearing that took place in the days following the attack on Reagan, the Secret Service’s assistant director for protective operations said the agency “wouldn’t have done anything differently,” The New York Times reported.reportedat the time. Knight noted that relevant information about the shooter was not passed on to the Secret Service before Reagan’s appearance, butalso saidthat a democratic society must balance security concerns with public access to the president.
Cheat, on the contrary,told CNN last weekthat if “there are things that we need to change in our policies, or in our procedures, or in our methods, we will certainly do so”.
Still, other comments she made raised eyebrows in Congress.
Chief among them is Cheatle, who said in an interview with ABC News that there were no officers stationed on the roof from which the shooter fired because the “slanted roof” created security concerns, despite other Secret Service snipers being positioned on a roof that it was also inclined.
Cheatle is also under fire for the Secret Service’s admission that it refused some Trump campaign requests for more security, in a shift from its initial denial that it did so.
“What we heard from the reports of requests for additional resources, that they went to the top of the organization, clearly, she was responsible for ensuring the security of Donald Trump and – and Joe Biden,” chairman of the House Intelligence Committee Mike Turner (R-Ohio) said on CBS’ “Face the Nation” on Sunday.
Lawmakers are particularly frustrated to learn at a briefing last week that the shooter, 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, was identified as a suspect nearly an hour before the shooting — and that Trump was allowed on stage 10 minutes after the hunt. the shooter began.
In addition to injuring Trump’s ear, the attack left one rally attendee in Butler, Pennsylvania, dead and two others seriously injured.
Some Republicans, however, have turned their attention to a familiar point of political flashpoint in light of the assassination attempt: diversity initiatives.
Conservatives particularly highlighted a diversity goal that Cheatle outlined in aCBS Interview Last Year: have 30 percent women recruited to the agency by 2025.
In response to conservative uproar over DEI initiatives and criticism of the hiring of female agents, Secret Service spokesman Anthony Guglielmi made “unsubstantiated claims” that agents are unqualified in a statement last week, ripping up “comments disgusting.”
“It is an insult to the women in our agency to suggest that they are not qualified based on gender. Such baseless claims undermine the professionalism, dedication and experience of our workforce,” Guglielmi said in the statement.
Trump, in turn, praised the “very brave Secret Service agents” who “ran to the stage” to protect him and quickly killed the shooter.
“They really did. They ran onto the stage,” an unusually emotional Trump said during his speech at the RNC last week. “They are great people who are at great risk, I will tell you, and they threw themselves at me so that I would be protected. There was blood running everywhere, but in a way I felt very safe because I had God by my side.”
This story originally appeared on thehill.com read the full story
