Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle resigns, sources say
US Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle has tendered her resignation amid scrutiny of security lapses related to the recent assassination attempt of former President Donald Trump, sources tell CNN.
The move comes as lawmakers and an internal government watchdog move forward with investigations into the agency’s handling of Trump’s protection and how a gunman came close to the killing the 2024 Republican presidential candidate at a rally in Pennsylvania this month.
There have been bipartisan calls in Congress for her resignation and a push by Republican lawmakers to impeach her. Lawmakers were particularly incensed after her appearance for public testimony in front of the House Oversight Commitee Monday, where she was unwilling to answer many of the committee’s questions.
During her House Oversight appearance, Cheatle acknowledged that there were “significant” and “colossal” problems with the security at the rally, but still rebuffed demands for her resignation.
“I think I am the best person to lead the Secret Service at this time,” Cheatle said Monday.
House Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters that the resignation is “overdue.”
“Now we have to pick up the pieces,” Johnson said. “We have to rebuild the American people’s faith and trust in the Secret Service as an agency. It has an incredibly important responsibility in protecting presidents, former presidents, and other officials in the executive branch, and we’ve got a lot of work to do.”
In the initial wake of the shooting, Cheatle was emphatic that she would not step down. Cheatle was appointed by President Joe Biden to lead the Secret Service in 2022.
In an interview with CNN last week, Cheatle said that the agency was “solely responsible” for the design and implementation of security at the Pennsylvania rally site, where the now-deceased gunman fired shots at Trump from an unsecured rooftop just a few hundred feet from the rally stage.
The bullets only narrowly missed Trump’s head, and the incident left one rallygoer dead and others injured.
As more has become known about the circumstances around the attempted attack, the Secret Service has been questioned about how it carried its protection of Trump that day, including the failure to control access to the rooftop and how the agency handled information, passed along by local law enforcement before the shooting, that identified the would-be assassin as a person acting suspiciously around the rally grounds.
The Secret Service and the Pennsylvania law enforcement, which assisted in the rally security efforts, have sometimes been at odds in their accounts of what happened and who was responsible for the lapses.
Cheatle had pledged her agency’s full cooperation with the congressional and internal government examinations of Secret Service’s approach to that day.
Cheatle had left a job managing Global Security at PepsiCo to take the USSS director post and before her stint in the private sector, had served in the Secret Service for 27 years.