Congressional pressure is mounting on Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle over the assassination attempt against former President Trump, with multiple lawmakers calling for her resignation ahead of a Monday morning hearing with the House Oversight Committee.
Republicans have been the most vocal in criticizing Cheatle; Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) have both demanded she step down.
And, in a stunning scene, a group of Republican senators who were frustrated about an unclassified phone briefing confronted Cheatle at the Republican National Convention (RNC) in Milwaukee, demanding she answer questions about the shooting — filming and later distributing the public encounter.
Some of the criticism has veered into culture war battles, with several Republicans pointing the finger at the agency’s diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) practices.
And further inflaming tensions is the acknowledgement from the Secret Service over the weekend that it had previously denied some requests from the Trump campaign for beefed up security, walking back a previous statement that such assertions were "absolutely false.”
There are indications that Democrats are scrutinizing her leadership, too. Rep. Brendan Boyle (D-Pa.) on Saturday became the first Democrat to call for Cheatle’s resignation.
“The evidence coming 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.
Oversight Chairman Jamie Comer (R-Ky.) and the panel’s ranking member, Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), issued a rare joint statement on Friday urging Cheatle to appear for the Monday hearing. Another Democrat on the panel, Rep. Jared Moskowitz (Fla.), said Cheatle should resign if she does not appear.
A Secret Service spokesperson confirmed on Friday that Cheatle will sit for the Monday hearing, the first in what could be a series of public hearings on the attempted assassination and security failures that enabled it.
The House Homeland Security Committee has also requested her presence at a Tuesday hearing, and the Speaker has pledged to create a bipartisan “task force” with subpoena authority to examine the attack.
Cheatle said in an ABC News interview last week that she will not step down. Standing in support of her is Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, who himself has faced intense criticism from Republicans and was impeached by the GOP-controlled House — which the Democratic-controlled Senate quickly dismissed. Mayorkas said he has “100 percent confidence” in Cheatle.
A Secret Service spokesperson said Friday the agency "is fully accountable for the safety of its protectees" and is pledging "complete cooperation with Congress, the FBI, and other relevant investigations."
Calls for hearings and demands for answers also followed the last close call on a president or former president’s life, when then-President Reagan survived an assassination attempt in 1981. Hearings with top officials convened just days after the attack, in which a gunman was able to get in close proximity to Reagan in a crowd of journalists as the president exited the Washington Hilton Hotel.
Then-Secret Service Director Stuart Knight, though, was not forced out of his position. And the agency was much less eager to take immediate responsibility.
During one Senate hearing that took place in the days after the attack on Reagan, the Secret Service assistant director for protective operations said that the agency “would not have done anything differently,” The New York Times reported at the time. Knight noted that relevant intelligence on the shooter was not passed to the Secret Service ahead of Reagan’s appearance, but also said that a democratic society must balance security concerns with public access to the president.
Cheatle, in contrast, told CNN last week that if “there are things that we need to change about our policies, or our procedures, or our methods, we are certainly going to do so.”
Still, other comments she has made have raised eyebrows in Congress.
Chief among those is Cheatle saying in an ABC News interview that there were no law enforcement officers stationed on the roof from which the shooter fired because the “sloped roof” created safety concerns, despite other Secret Service snipers being positioned on a roof that was also sloped.
Cheatle is also getting heat over Secret Service’s admission that it had turned down some Trump campaign requests for more security, in a change from an initial denial that it did so.
“What we're hearing from the reports from requests for additional resources, that they went to the top of the organization, clearly, she was the one responsible for ensuring the safety of Donald Trump and – and Joe Biden,” House Intelligence Committee Chair Mike Turner (R-Ohio) said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday.
Lawmakers are particularly frustrated about learning in a briefing last week that the shooter, 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, was identified as suspicious almost an hour before the shooting — and that Trump was allowed to go on stage 10 minutes after the hunt for the shooter began.
In addition to injuring Trump’s ear, the attack left one attendee at the Butler, Pa., rally dead and two others critically injured.
Some Republicans, though, have turned the focus to a familiar point of political inflammation in light of the attempted assassination: diversity initiatives.
Conservatives have in particular highlighted a diversity goal that Cheatle outlined in a CBS interview last year: to have 30 percent female recruits to the agency by 2025.
In response to conservative uproar about the DEI initiatives and criticism of the hiring female agents, Secret Service spokesperson Anthony Guglielmi tore into “baseless assertions” that agents are unqualified in a statement last week, ripping the “disgusting comments.”
“It is an insult to the women of our agency to imply that they are unqualified based on gender. Such baseless assertions undermine the professionalism, dedication and expertise of our workforce,” Guglielmi said in the statement.
Trump, for his part, has heaped praise on the “very brave Secret Service agents” who “rushed to the stage” to protect him and quickly killed the shooter.
“They really did. They rushed to the stage,” an unusually emotional Trump said during his speech at the RNC last week. “These are great people at great risk, I will tell you, and pounced on top of me so that I would be protected. There was blood pouring everywhere, and yet in a certain way I felt very safe because I had God on my side.”
