Secret Service Director Cheatle grilled by both sides in brutal hearing

Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle faced growing, bipartisan calls for her resignation during a brutal hearing Monday on the attempted assassination of former President Trump. 

Lawmakers from both parties on the House Oversight and Accountability Committee — which is known for its fiery hearings and partisan rhetoric — expressed exasperation, frustration and at times disbelief at Cheatle’s testimony.

“This committee is not known for its model of bipartisanship,” said Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), the panel’s chair. “We came together unanimously in our disappointment for your lack of answers.”

Cheatle, who has been in her role for just less than two years, admitted the assassination attempt was the “most significant operational failure of the Secret Service in decades.”

“The Secret Service’s solemn mission is to protect our nation’s leaders. On July 13, we failed,” she said in her opening remarks. “As a director of the United States Secret Service, I take full responsibility for any security lapse of our agency.”

But her resistance to providing details about the shooting and the Secret Service’s actions — she at one point said, “I have a timeline that does not have specifics” — will raise new questions about how long she’ll remain in her job. 

Several Democrats on Monday joined the calls for her to resign, including Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), the panel’s top Democrat. 

“I don’t want to add to the director’s terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day, but I will be joining the chairman in calling for the resignation of the director just because I think that this relationship is irretrievable at this point,” Raskin said.

“And I think that the director has lost the confidence of Congress at a very urgent and tender moment in the history of the country. And we need to very quickly move beyond this.”

Shortly after the hearing closed, Comer and Raskin penned a joint letter — another rarity — demanding Cheatle’s resignation.

“Today, you failed to provide answers to basic questions regarding that stunning operational failure and to reassure the American people that the Secret Service has learned its lessons and begun to correct its systemic blunders and failures. In the middle of a presidential election, the Committee and the American people demand serious institutional accountability and transparency that you are not providing,” they wrote.

Cheatle repeatedly declined to get into specifics about the investigation into how 20-year-old suspect Thomas Matthew Crooks was able to gain access to and open fire from a nearby roof shortly after Trump started speaking at the July 13 rally in Butler, Pa. The former president was injured, one rally attendee was killed, and two others were severely injured.

Republicans were at times bombastic in voicing their displeasure with Cheatle. Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) said she was “full of s‑‑‑.” Rep. Lisa McClain (R-Mich.) asked Cheatle if she had Alzheimer’s disease or dementia because she could not recall all the details.

At one point, Cheatle’s response about not having a specific timeline of events for the hearing drew exasperated laughter from lawmakers. 

“That’s shocking. That is absolutely unacceptable. That means you are a failure at your job,” said Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), who had been questioning Cheatle.

Democrats, too, expressed irritation with Cheatle’s answers. 

“Can you explain why you are answering so many fewer questions here than you have to the media?” Rep. Dan Goldman (D-N.Y.) asked at one point.

“You’re not making this easy for us,” Rep. Shontel Brown (D-Ohio) said at another.

Cheatle explained that her seeming reticence was because she did not want to provide incorrect information, citing multiple ongoing investigations with the Department of Justice, multiple inspector general offices, in Congress, and internally.

Some of her previous comments to the press had prompted blowback. Cheatle, for instance, told ABC News that Secret Service agents were not stationed on the “sloped roof” that the shooter accessed due to safety concerns. 

Cheatle in the hearing said she “should have been more clear” in that interview, and that “there was a plan in place to provide overwatch,” but the agency is still looking into how responsibilities were assigned.

At one point, a frustrated Rep. Russell Fry (R-S.C.) laid out a lengthy list of all the questions Cheatle had failed to answer, including the number of agents and local police that were at the rally, whether requests for additional security had been denied, whether law enforcement officials were able to engage with the would-be assassin before the shooting, how the shooter got on the roof, how the rifle got on the roof, how many shots he fired total, or whether shell casings were recovered. 

“You can’t tell us anything about his cell phone. You can’t tell us whether the rally was supposed to be postponed given the intelligence that you were receiving. You can’t tell us whether the [shooter’s] car had a bomb. You can’t even tell us his motive. And the American people are incredibly distrustful because it has taken nine days to even get a scintilla of evidence out of you,” Fry said.

Still, there were several new revelations about the assassination attempt on Trump, including that the Secret Service had been told about a “suspicious person” at the rally two to five times before the shooting, and the agency deemed the shooter a threat only “seconds” before he opened fire.

Cheatle also disclosed that the roof where the shooter fired from was identified as a potential vulnerability days before the rally.

But those details raised more questions from lawmakers, frustrated the former president was still able to walk onstage even as the Secret Service was evaluating the notifications about Crooks.

Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.) played a video showing spectators pointing out Crooks, while Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-Fla.) ran through the reported warnings about the shooter, highlighting at least five times law enforcement sounded the alarm about his presence.

Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) called it “the worst thing of all, of all the breakdown in all this communication” at the rally.

The hearing seemed to draw the two sides of the aisle together in what has been an especially charged and partisan political atmosphere, with Raskin calling that aspect of the proceedings “unusually encouraging.”

“I … didn’t see any daylight between the members of the two parties today at the hearing, in terms of our bafflement and outrage about the shocking operational failures that led to disaster and near catastrophe on July 13, 2024,” Raskin said in his closing remarks. “What is depressing is the extraordinary communications gap between the director of the Secret Service and Congress.” 

Rebecca Beitsch contributed.