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Kimberly Cheatle, the director of the Secret Service, the U.S. government agency responsible for the safety of the president, vice president, and former presidents, has resigned. She announced this on Tuesday in an email sent to her staff. She had been the director of the agency since 2022.
The Secret Service faced substantial criticism and was the focus of various investigations following the assassination attempt against Donald Trump on July 13, where the former U.S. president was slightly injured in the ear by a 20-year-old who shot at him during a rally in Pennsylvania.
On Monday, Cheatle had participated in a hearing where several lawmakers harshly criticized her for security management issues at the rally. During that occasion, Cheatle described the attack as “the greatest operational failure” of the Secret Service in recent decades and took responsibility for the security lapses. However, she did not provide clear answers to many of the questions posed to her: for example, she did not state how many agents were assigned to protect Trump, or why the rooftop where the shooter had positioned himself was left outside the security perimeter despite being just over 100 meters from the stage where the former president would speak.
At the end of the hearing, 15 members of Congress, including 12 Republicans and three Democrats, called for Cheatle’s resignation, but she responded by stating that she had no intention of resigning. In the email on Tuesday announcing her resignation, Cheatle wrote that as director she takes “full responsibility for the shortcomings in security.”
Cheatle is 53 years old and joined the Secret Service shortly after completing college nearly 30 years ago. During the September 11, 2001 attacks, she was part of the team responsible for the safety of then-Vice President Dick Cheney. Subsequently, she was part of Joe Biden’s detail from 2008 to 2016 when he was vice president: she was specifically responsible for protecting his wife, Jill Biden. She temporarily left the agency in 2021 but returned in 2022 when Biden, now president, appointed her head of the Secret Service.
– Read also: The Secret Service issues date back a long way
On the evening of Saturday, July 13 (night in Italy), Thomas Matthew Crooks, a 20-year-old, fired several shots at Trump during a rally in Butler, a town north of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Crooks was then killed by Secret Service agents, while Trump was briefly hospitalized and later flew back to his home in New Jersey. In addition to Trump, several individuals in the crowd were also hit: one man died, and two others were seriously injured but survived. Crooks’ motives are still unclear.
In the days following, it emerged that Crooks had actually been seen before the rally began while wandering around the buildings from which he later fired and was considered a “suspicious” person by some Butler police officers, but he subsequently blended into the crowd.
The assassination attempt on Trump was the first against a sitting or former president of the United States since 1981, when then-President Ronald Reagan (Republican) was shot, resulting in a punctured lung, while getting into a car after a rally in Washington, D.C. Reagan survived but spent several days in the hospital.