US Secret Service chief resigns over Trump assassination failures

Kimberly Cheatle, head of the US Secret Service, finally resigned on Tuesday, 10 days after the attack on Donald Trump, which she herself defined as “the agency’s biggest operational failure in decades.” The resignation came the day after her appearance on Capitol Hill, during which she had to listen to repeated calls from lawmakers from both parties for her to step down.

“The solemn mission of the Secret Service is to protect our nation’s leaders. And on July 13, we failed,” Cheatle told the congressional committee that questioned her on Monday. She also took “full responsibility” for what happened that day, but refused to resign, saying she is “proud beyond words” of how her people reacted after the shooting. Cheatle, who has been in the force for three decades and worked protecting Joe Biden when he was vice president, held a political office and had authority over 8,000 agents.

She herself gave the news to her employees in an email sent on Tuesday and obtained by the American media.. In it, he elaborates on the idea that on July 13, during a Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, where the former president narrowly escaped an assassination attempt, the Secret Service “failed to fulfill its mission.” As a result, the message continues, Cheatle is taking responsibility. That day, one of the attendees at the election rally, a volunteer firefighter named Cory Comperatore, was shot dead by the attacker, Thomas Crooks, a 20-year-old whose motivations remain unclear, while two others were wounded. Neither of their lives are in danger.

“I do not want the noise about my possible resignation to be a distraction from the great work each and every one of you is doing to accomplish our critical mission,” Cheatle continued in the email, adding that the decision was made “with great regret.”

During Monday’s hearing, a public ridicule that lasted several hours and saw no letup, Cheatle said she believed she was “the best person in America right now to do this job.” In a rare display of bipartisanship these days, leaders from both sides of the aisle banded together to convince her otherwise. At the end of the Capitol Hill session, Congressman Jamie Raskin, a Democrat from Maryland, and Congressman James Comer, a Republican from Kentucky, the two highest-ranking members of the committee, signed a joint letter demanding that Cheatle step aside to take responsibility.

Before she wrote that letter, there had been several calls for her to resign. California Congressman Ro Khana, for example, asked her if she thought the failure of her Secret Service could be compared to the one that made possible the assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan in Washington in 1981. Without hesitation, she said yes. To which Khana replied: “Do you know what the person who was in charge at the time did? I’ll tell you: he resigned.”

One of the harshest was Ohio Republican Mike Turner. “Since Donald Trump is alive, and thank God he is, you are the very picture of incompetence,” Turner told Cheatle, who demanded that President Biden fire her if she did not agree to resign. “If Donald Trump had been assassinated, he would be guilty now.” Another Republican, Nancy Mace, went straight to the disqualifications when she called her a “piece of shit,” while Lauren Boebert, a Colorado hawk, got her to confess that Cheatle called Trump after the attack, and apologized to him.

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