Kimberly A. Cheatle, head of the US Secret Service, resigned herself to public ridicule on Monday in an appearance before the House of Representatives to answer questions from congressmen about the operation deployed by the body she leads last Saturday, July 13, at a Donald Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. The former president was slightly injured, and one attendee at the election, Cory Comperatore, died and two others were left in critical condition. “It was the most significant failure of the agency in decades,” admitted Cheatle.
“The solemn mission of the Secret Service is to protect our nation’s leaders. And on July 13, we failed,” she added, before assuming “full responsibility” for what happened that day. She also said she was “proud beyond words” of how her team acted after the shooting. Cheatle holds a political office and commands a force of 8,000 agents.
Cheatle heard calls from both sides of the aisle for her to resign. One of the harshest was from California Congressman Ro Khana, who asked her if she thought her Secret Service failure was comparable to the one surrounding the attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan in Washington in 1981. Without hesitation, she said yes. To which Khana replied: “Do you know what the person who was in charge of that position did? I’ll tell you: He resigned.”
Lawmakers from both parties focused their questioning on trying to understand how a 20-year-old named Thomas Crooks could get so close to where the Republican candidate was speaking to thousands of his supporters, climb onto the roof of an industrial building that was outside the protected perimeter and comfortably aim his AR-15-style rifle from a distance of about 150 yards.
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In response to questions from Jamie Raskin, the committee’s ranking Democrat, Cheatle said he believed “there were a sufficient number of agents assigned,” although he declined to give an exact figure. The first half hour of his appearance was a tug-of-war between the congressmen and the head of the Secret Service, who refused to go into detail on the most specific issues, citing the fact that the investigation “is still open.” This was the case, for example, when Republican Michael Cloud, a congressman from Texas, asked her for information about the explosives that, as it became known in the following days, Crooks was carrying in the white car in which he covered the 80 kilometers that separated his house in Bethel Park (Pennsylvania) from the farm where the rally was held.
In his testimony, Cheatle tied up a few of the many loose ends in the story of Crooks, whose motivations remain unclear: his political sympathies are not at this point — he had recently registered as a Republican, although he also made a token donation to the Democrats in 2020 — and from the study of his digital footprint, it is not possible to conclude much either. He saved images of Donald Trump, but also of Joe Biden, Attorney General Merrick B. Garland and even FBI Director Christopher A. Wray, both trusted officials of the president. There were also photos of Rudy Giuliani, a confidant of former President Trump, and of the leaders of the majority and minority in the House of Representatives, Mike Johnson (Republican) and Hakeem Jeffries (Democrat). His search history includes a query about “major depressive disorders” and also dates and places of rallies for Biden and Trump.
On Monday it emerged that after he was killed by a Secret Service sniper, his body could be identified by tracing the origin of the gun he was carrying, which his father had bought 11 years ago. Crooks had no identification on him.
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