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The head of the Secret Service has reversed herself and will now be testifying before Congress to answer mounting questions surrounding the assassination attempt last week against former President Donald Trump at a rally in Pennsylvania.
The Hill reported that Director Kimberly Cheatle responded to a congressional subpoena requiring her to appear before the House Oversight and Accountability Committee on Monday.
“We are committed to better understanding what happened before, during and after the assassination attempt of former President Trump to ensure it never happens again,” the Secret Service said in a Friday statement.
Cheatle had agreed to appear earlier this week, but committee chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) indicated that the Department of Homeland Security, under which the Secret Service falls, had intervened to stop her testimony.
On Wednesday, Comer issued a subpoena to require her to appear on Monday, prompting the DHS’s assistant secretary for legislative affairs to respond with a letter expressing the department’s dissatisfaction with the committee’s decision to issue a subpoena so quickly. Additionally, the department inquired whether Cheatle could provide testimony at a later date in the week, but the committee turned down that request, The Hill noted.
“Americans demand answers from Director Kimberly Cheatle about the Secret Service’s historic security failures that led to the attempted assassination of President Trump, murder of an innocent victim, and harm to others in the crowd. We look forward to Director Cheatle’s testimony on Monday, July 22 to deliver the transparency and accountability Americans deserve,” Comer said in a statement after the director agreed to appear.
Following an unclassified briefing by Cheatle and FBI Director Christopher Wray to House and Senate members on Wednesday, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) demanded that President Biden dismiss Cheatle.
“But the oversight here, the mistakes, the ineptitude, whatever it is, was inexcusable,” Johnson said on Fox News. “They did not give satisfactory answers to some very important questions. And some of it needs to be in a classified setting, I suppose.”
During the briefing, Cheatle informed members of Congress that the Secret Service had identified the shooter as suspicious one hour before his assassination attempt.
Conservative pundit, author, and entrepreneur Dan Bongino, who spent 12 years as a Secret Service agent, also called for the agency’s current director to immediately step down following the near-assassination.
Describing the attack at a Saturday rally in Butler, Pa., an “apocalyptic security failure,” Bongino, who once served on the protective details of then-Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama after a stint as an instructor at the Secret Service Training Academy in Maryland, was responding to a statement the agency put out claiming officials “added protective resources & technology & capabilities as part of the increased campaign travel tempo.”
He went on to slam his old employer for refusing to take responsibility for the incident, which left Trump exposed after a series of prior discoveries by bystanders, local police, and Service agents on the scene that should have led to some sort of intervention against the shooter, 20-year-old Thomas Crooks.
“This is the best technology we have’? Really? To let a sniper 150 yards away from the potential next president shoot a piece of his ear off?” Bongino told Fox News. “Kimberly Cheatle has failed Donald Trump, and honestly failed Joe Biden too.”
He also said that agency counter-sniper teams failed to engage Crooks before he was able to squeeze off several shots.
“We’re trained out to 1,000 yards in the Secret Service with the counter-sniper team. How did they miss someone at most one-fifth of the way there? It doesn’t make any sense. And even worse, it’s broad daylight on a white roof,” Bongino added.
The Secret Service has strongly denied reports that Trump’s security detail requested reinforcements and were denied. However, Bongino asserts that he can prove otherwise. “I can tell you actual quotes,” he said on Sunday.
“I can tell you, and absolutely confirm, from the horse’s mouth, from multiple people … there have been repeated requests to increase the security footprint, around not just the residences of Donald Trump, but the body itself,” the former Secret Service agent said. “And they have been rebuffed.”
