Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle faced a barrage of questions Monday about the assassination attempt of former President Trump but offered few answers, infuriating lawmakers who increased their calls for her resignation.
Cheatle took fire from all sides, with Democrats joining the GOP in both their frustration with the director and disbelief over her inability to explain the events that led to Thomas Matthew Crooks shooting Trump from a rooftop only 150 yards away, an incident that left one rally attendee dead and two others critically injured.
“I have to say, I don’t think any of our concerns have been addressed today. And what little we’ve learned has not inspired much confidence,” Rep. Summer Lee (D-Pa.) said.
Rep. Nick Langworthy (R-N.Y.) called it “literally the worst performance I’ve ever seen” in a congressional hearing.
“You have brought more shame to your agency than I think that the assassination attempt has at this point.”
Brutal hearing for Cheatle
Cheatle said at the outset that she would be unable to answer certain questions due both to ongoing investigations and security protocols.
But her sidestepping of questions left lawmakers fuming over their inability to get answers — contending the director refused to provide details about aspects of the attacks that have already been publicly reported.
Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-Fla.) noted that a series of university presidents resigned after a recent hearing on campus protests, adding, “That’s how this is going for you.”
“I don’t know who prepared you for this. I don’t know how many times you’ve testified in front of Congress. But a president was almost assassinated live on television, not just for Americans but for the world to see. And this being your first opportunity — I understand there’s an ongoing investigation; I understand there’s things that you can not talk about — but the idea that we’re getting less than you did on [a] television [interview] is something that Democrats, independents or Republicans are going to find unacceptable.”
At another point, Cheatle brushed off questions from Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), who asked for a timeline of the day of the shooting.
Cheatle responded, “I have a timeline that does not have specifics,” prompting audible laughter within the hearing room.
The Secret Service director also was called out several times for not yet having visited the site of the shooting, including by Rep. Pat Fallon (R-Texas).
“Nine days, and you have not visited the site,” Fallon said. “You should have been there that night.”
He later added, “the shooter has visited the site two more times than you have,” referring to the knowledge that Crooks had visited the site of the rally ahead of the shooting.
Calls to resign grow
The hearing marked a turning point for Democrats, who entered Monday’s hearing with just one member calling for Cheatle’s resignation and closed the session with several more.
Ranking member Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) nodded to the hours-long takedown of Cheatle before saying he was calling for her to step aside.
“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.”
Moskowitz also called for Cheatle’s resignation, as did Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.).
“I just don’t think this is partisan. If you have an assassination attempt on a president, a former president, or a candidate, you need to resign,” Khanna said during his questioning of Cheatle.
“You cannot go leading a Secret Service agency when there is an assassination attempt on a presidential candidate.”
A series of Republicans likewise called for Cheatle to leave her post throughout the hearing.
Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.) criticized Cheatle for failing to answer “simple questions” about the attempted assassination, noting the bipartisan discord.
“Some of my colleagues have texted me over the last couple days — bipartisan — about whether you should lose your job, and I’ve been quiet on that question. Because I wanted to see what you were going to do today,” he said.
“In my opinion, you do need to be fired immediately.”
Democrats focus on gun violence
Democrats seized on the hearing as an opportunity to tackle the topic of gun control, pressing for action in placing stricter controls on assault weapons such as the AR-15, which the gunman used.
In his closing remarks, Raskin said the shooting was both a failure of the Secret Service as well as Congress, as “the mass shooting that took place in Butler, Pa., is replicated all over the country every day.”
“The president, the former president, the handful of people who get the Secret Service protection are the only people in America we thought were safe from an AR-15 attack. It’s clear that they’re not safe either, and we’ve got to get to the bottom of that,” he said.
“But we also have to get to the bottom of the larger problem, which is that the whole country is living like this, in fear and in terror of assault weapon attacks in movie theaters, churches, synagogues, mosques, supermarkets, Walmarts.”
And Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.) grew visibly frustrated after Cheatle repeatedly evaded his questions on whether the ubiquity of guns in the United States has made her job more difficult.
Cheatle said the threat environment for protecting individuals “is always difficult, and that’s dynamic, and it’s always evolving,” sidestepping the line of questioning.
Cheatle largely didn’t address the issue until faced with hypotheticals.
“There are over 400 million guns on the streets. If all of those guns were machine guns, would that make your job harder to protect people? Again, if all of those guns were rocket-propelled grenades, would that make your job harder?” Moskowitz asked.
“Yes,” Cheatle answered.
“OK, thank you. Perfect. This is not a trick question,” Moskowitz responded.
Republicans pin blame on DEI policies
Republicans brought up their concerns with diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies during the hearing, with the criticism at times getting personal.
“Ma’am, you are a DEI horror story,” Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) told Cheatle. “I’ve told my daughter multiple times … about how she’ll succeed in life. She’ll succeed in life by achieving. Ma’am, you have not achieved today. You have let the American public down.”
Cheatle has nearly 30 years of experience working for the Secret Service, including as the special agent in charge of the Atlanta field office and as the assistant director of protective operations. She has been in her current role as director for just under two years.
Conservatives have highlighted a diversity goal that Cheatle outlined in a CBS interview last year to have 30 percent female recruits to the agency by 2025.
Last week, Secret Service spokesperson Anthony Guglielmi tore into “baseless assertions” that female agents are unqualified, ripping the “disgusting comments.”
Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas) jumped off Burchett’s comment with her questioning, asking: “Was the incident on July 13 due to DEI, or rather systemic failures in communication and potentially safety protocols?”
“The incident on the 13th has nothing to do with DEI,” Cheatle said. “The incident on the 13th has to do with a failure or a gap in either planning or communication.”
Secret Service received repeated warnings
One new detail that emerged during the hearing was the extent the Secret Service received warnings about Crooks, the shooter, whose presence on a nearby roof was repeatedly flagged.
Cheatle told members of Congress that the agency received anywhere from two to five warnings about the shooter who would ultimately fire at Trump.
“I don’t have an exact number to share with you today, but for what I’ve been able to discern, somewhere between two and five times there was some sort of communication about a suspicious individual to the Secret Service,” Cheatle said in response to questioning from Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-Fla.).
But she later said Crooks was not deemed a “threat” until seconds before he fired on Trump.
For his part, Frost listed a series of warnings about the shooter or his location.
“According to reports, the shooter was photographed twice by security officers prior to the shooting. A police officer saw the shooter on the ground and reported him with a photograph as a suspicious person. Multiple local law enforcement officers identified the shooter, radioed that he was acting suspiciously near the event’s magnetometers. A local law enforcement tactical team saw the shooter on a roof and notified other security services and also photographed him. One police officer who photographed the shooter saw him scoping out the roof and carrying a range finder,” Frost said.
“Why wasn’t the event paused right then?”
Burchett called that dynamic the biggest failure by the agency that day.
“Why was President Trump allowed on stage 10 minutes after the Secret Service spotted a suspicious individual? That seems to me to be the worst thing of all, of all the breakdown in all this communication, all the BS you’ve been feeding us here today — or not feeding us — that seems to be the question,” he said.