United States – US Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle resigned on Tuesday following criticism over the agency’s inability to prevent a would-be assassin from shooting the former President Donald Trump when he was giving a campaign speech the White House revealed.
Security Breach
The Secret Service, which actively protects current and former presidents of the United States, experiences a crisis due to the fact that a gunman was able to fire at Trump from a roof with a view on the open-air meeting in Butler, Pennsylvania on July 13.
“The independent review to get to the bottom of what happened on July 13 continues, and I look forward to assessing its conclusions,” Democratic President Joe Biden said in a statement. “We all know what happened that day can never happen again.”
Biden stated that he would be deciding on a replacement soon.
Cheatle became an enemy to both the Republicans and Democrats when she appeared before the House of Representative Oversight Committee on Monday to answer some questions regarding the security plan for the rally as well as the conduct of law enforcement in handling the suspicious movements of the gunman, as reported by Reuters.
Many members of the Republican and Democratic parties had demanded her resignation.
Republican presidential candidate Trump was shot in the right ear, and there was one fatality among the people attending the rally. The gunman who opened fire was 20-year-old Thomas Crooks, who was fatally shot by a Secret Service sniper.
“While Director Cheatle’s resignation is a step toward accountability, we need a full review of how these security failures happened so that we can prevent them going forward,” James Comer, the Republican chair of the House Oversight Committee, said in a statement. “We will continue our oversight of the Secret Service.”
Immediate Reactions and Consequences
Cheatle, who has been in charge of the Agency since 2022, testified that she was personally accountable for the shooting, which she described as the biggest lapse by the Agency since then-President Ronald Reagan was shot in 1981.
Presently, the Secret Service has to deal with investigations from different congressional committees and the inspector general of the parent organization of the U. S. Department of Homeland Security. Such calls have been made, among others, by President Joe Biden, who has recently ended his reelection bid.
Most of the criticism has been directed at police’s inability to neutralize the roof of an industrial building where the gunman was entrenched about 150 yards from the stage, which Trump occupied at the time.
It was defined as an area beyond the Secret Service security zone for the event, which was also commented on by former officers and members of Congress.
Historical Context and Agency Challenges
Cheatle had been a senior security official at PepsiCo when Biden appointed her to become the director of the Secret Service in 2022. She had 27 years of experience in the Agency before.
She assumed the post after a series of scandals surrounding the secret service dealing a major blow on an agency that had remained secretive and exclusive.
Ten Special Service agents were fired after reports that they took women, including some prostitutes, to their hotel rooms before Obama’s official trip to Colombia in 2012, as reported by Reuters.
The Agency was also accused of deleting text messages though from the period around the attack on the U. S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. Those messages were later turned over to a congressional panel investigating the riot.