Kimberly Cheatle said the attack on Trump was “the most significant operational failure”
Washington:
The director of the US Secret Service, Kimberly Cheatle, resigned on Tuesday, a day after acknowledging that the agency failed in its mission to prevent an assassination attempt on Donald Trump.
Cheatle was facing bipartisan calls to resign after a 20-year-old gunman injured the former Republican president and current White House candidate at a July 13 campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.
“It’s about time she did it, she should have done it at least a week ago,” Mike Johnson, the Republican speaker of the House of Representatives, told reporters. “I’m happy to see that she answered the call of both Republicans and Democrats.”
Cheatle appeared before a congressional committee on Monday and said the attack on Trump, who was slightly injured in his right ear, represented a failure by the Secret Service.
She called it “the Secret Service’s most significant operational failure in decades.”
Both Republicans and Democrats have called for Cheatle’s resignation. She drew the ire of lawmakers from both parties by refusing to provide specific details about the attack, citing the existence of multiple active investigations.
The gunman opened fire on Trump with an AR-style assault rifle just minutes after he began speaking at the campaign event.
Perched on the roof of a nearby building, he was shot dead by a Secret Service sniper less than 30 seconds after firing the first of eight shots.
Investigators concluded that the young man, who lived in a town about 80 kilometers from Butler, acted alone and was unable to identify any strong ideological or political tendencies.
Two rally attendees were seriously injured and a 50-year-old Pennsylvania firefighter, Corey Comperatore, was shot to death.
Trump’s former doctor said over the weekend that the Republican nominee suffered a two-centimeter (nearly an inch) gunshot wound to his right ear.
“The bullet passed by, coming within a quarter of an inch of entering his head, and struck the top of his right ear,” said former White House physician Ronny Jackson.
Cheatle served as a Secret Service agent for 27 years before leaving in 2021 to become head of North American security for PepsiCo.
She was nominated to lead the agency by President Joe Biden in 2022.
(Except the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
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