Simon Marks: Secret Service head Kimberly Cheatle quits over Donald Trump assassination bid

US Secret Service director Kimberly Cheatle has resigned after the agency came under harsh scrutiny for its failure to stop a would-be assassin from wounding former President Donald Trump during a campaign rally.

The agency did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The Secret Service, which is responsible for the protection of current and former US presidents, faces a crisis after a gunman was able to fire on Trump from a roof overlooking the outdoor rally in Butler, Pennsylvania on July 13.

“I take full responsibility for the security lapse,” Cheatle said in an email to staff on Tuesday, the Associated Press reported.

A screengrab shows Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump being rushed offstage after the shooting. Photo / Getty Images 

“In light of recent events, it is with a heavy heart that I have made the difficult decision to step down as your director.”

Cheatle faced bipartisan condemnation when she appeared before the House of Representatives Oversight Committee on Monday, declining to answer questions from frustrated lawmakers about the security plan for the rally and how law enforcement responded to the suspicious behaviour of the gunman.

Several Republican and Democratic lawmakers called on her to resign.

Trump, the Republican presidential candidate, was grazed in the right ear and a rally attendee was killed in the gunfire.

Law enforcement react after shots were fired at the rally of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. Photo / Getty

The gunman, identified as a 20-year-old Thomas Crooks, was shot and killed by a Secret Service sniper.

Cheatle, who has led the agency since 2022, told lawmakers she took responsibility for the shooting and called it the largest failure by the Secret Service since then-President Ronald Reagan was shot in 1981.

The Secret Service faces investigations from multiple congressional committees and the internal watchdog of the US Department of Homeland Security, its parent organisation, over its performance.

US President Joe Biden, who has ended his re-election campaign, has also called for an independent review.

Much of the criticism has focused on the failure to secure the roof of an industrial building where the gunman was perched about 140 metres from the stage where Trump was speaking.

The rooftop was declared outside the Secret Service security perimeter for the event, a decision criticised by former agents and politicians.

Cheatle held a top security role at PepsiCo when Biden named her Secret Service director in 2022.

She previously served 27 years in the agency.

Former US President Donald Trump was hit in his right ear in a shooting at his rally in the US state of Pennsylvania. Infographic / Getty Images

She took over following a series of scandals involving the Secret Service that scarred the reputation of an elite and insular agency.

Ten Secret Service agents lost their jobs after revelations they brought women, some of them prostitutes, back to their hotel rooms ahead of a trip to Colombia by then-President Barack Obama in 2012.

The agency also faced allegations that it erased text messages from about the time of the January 6, 2021 riots on the US Capitol.

Those messages were later sought by a congressional panel probing the riot.

The US House of Representatives said on Tuesday it was forming a bipartisan task force to investigate the shooting of Trump.

The panel, comprised of seven Republicans and six Democrats, will make recommendations for reforms to relevant gove

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Are they loving calmly yet? So, friends, we have one
hundred and five days until election day, and in that
time we've got some work to do. But we're not
afraid of hard work. We like hard work, don't we,
And we will win this election here, stay tight. Simon

(00:22):
Marx with a Simon morning to you, Morning to you, Mike.
So she seems on a roll, not officially but unofficially.
She's got the numbers.

Speaker 2 (00:31):
Right, Yes, absolutely, I mean, the first opinion poll has
been published, which is a Reuters poll, shows that Kamala
Harris is nationally two points ahead of Donald Trump, which
is a complete reversal of where things were when Joe
Biden was still the presidential nominee. He was two points
behind Joe Biden. So Democrats feeling extremely buoyed about that.

(00:55):
Kamala Harris, you just heard it there. She's campaigning in Milwaukee.
If the name of that city rings a bell, it should,
because that's where we all were last week for the
Republican Convention. Now, Milwaukee itself is a pretty solidly democratic city,
so she's gone there to engage in a bit of
a coarse correction, as it were. Although Republicans were making

(01:18):
a broader play for Wisconsin by holding their convention there.
But while she was on the road, she got fresh
news from Washington, d C. The endorsement of Senate Majority
Leader Chuck Schumer and the Democrat leader in the House
of Representatives, Hakeem Jeffries, which means that basically, at the moment,

(01:38):
the only holdout in terms of endorsing her is former
President Barack Obama. But he has a long tradition of
endorsing people relatively late in the game.

Speaker 1 (01:48):
Okay, then we get to Ntnyah, who comes at a
most fascinating time. So he'll meet Trump? Is he going
to meet is Biden?

Speaker 2 (01:55):
Beck?

Speaker 1 (01:55):
Will he meet Buden?

Speaker 2 (01:58):
He is going to Biden? Will will be back and
he is going to meet Biden. Benjamin Netanyaho very controversially
invited to make an address to a joint session of Congress.
Under normal circumstances, Kamala Harris would be there. She'd be
sitting right behind him in her capacity as President of
the Senate, which is a job that goes hand in

(02:19):
hand with the Vice presidency. She's going to skip the address,
which has led Republicans to say that she is insulting
nets and Yahoo and America's iron clad ally Israel. Instead,
she's going to be on the campaign trail. She will
hold a later one on one meeting with the Israeli
Prime Minister, so will Joe Biden, but also so will

(02:42):
Donald Trump, who has announced today that Benjamin Netanyahu will
be his guest at Mara Largo. So the Republicans absolutely
making the play to be seen as the most pro
Israel party out there. And the meeting with Kamala Harris
could be difficult because she is a aparently going to
deliver a tougher message to Prime Minister net and Yahoo

(03:04):
than her boss, President Biden has delivered in the months
since the reprisals in Garf had taken place for the
Hamas assault on Israel on October the seventh last year.

Speaker 1 (03:17):
Simon, while I've got to you Kim Chidle yesterday, I mean
six hours of the most grueling testimony IBY ever seen,
or cross examination I have ever seen. The only question
I have is how is it it took her so
long for the penny to drop and actually quit?

Speaker 2 (03:31):
Well, I think if you look at her mike during
that testimony in Congress yesterday, she must already have known
that she was going to resign. I mean she servently
refused to answer questions, constantly fighting the ongoing FBI investigation
into what happened in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July the thirteenth,
the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, but it made it

(03:53):
look like she was stonewalling the committee. She had already
conceded that the events at that rally represented the largest
failure for the Secret Service since the attempted assassination of
Ronald Reagan in nineteen eighty one. She was pressed multiple
times by both Democrats and Republicans, who are now launching

(04:14):
their own investigation together, a bipartisan move into what went
wrong at the hands of the Secret Service when Donald
Trump was nearly killed by that would be assassin with
an AR fifteen assault rifle. And she constantly said, I
can't answer because the FBI's in the middle of an investigation.
So today she has gone, I think that was an

(04:36):
absolutely inevitable outcome. Put these probes into what went wrong threaten,
I think, to undermine public credibility in the Secret Service.
The more they investigate and the more they find out
about how that gunman could possibly have been on that
roof of a nearby building, clear line of sight one

(04:56):
hundred yards away from the former president of the United Good.

Speaker 1 (05:00):
To see you might catch up soon. Simon Marx out
of the States for US this morning. For more from
the Mic Asking Breakfast, listen live to News Talks it'
B from six am weekdays, or follow the podcast on
iHeartRadio