Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle resigned from her post on Tuesday after a colossal failure that nearly ended in the assassination of former President Donald Trump, but many questions about the violent incident remain unanswered.
“I have made the difficult decision to step down as your Director,” she wrote in an internal letter to the Secret Service following Monday’s House Oversight and Accountability Committee hearing in which members from both sides of the aisle went after Cheatle.
“While Director Cheatle’s resignation is a step toward accountability, we need a full review of how these security failures happened so that we can prevent them going forward,” House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., said in a statement.
Cheatle conceded that the Secret Service “failed to protect our nation’s leaders.”
Throughout Monday’s hearing, Cheatle continuously deferred to the FBI or claimed she was not allowed to speak on the matter because it was a “pending investigation.”
The Secret Service has a “zero fail mission,” yet a week and a half ago, the nation witnessed the most catastrophic failure since the near-assassination of former President Ronald Reagan. And still, critical questions remain unanswered by the agency and Cheatle.
- Who decided what the perimeter was?
- Why didn’t the perimeter include a nearly flat rooftop within 150 yards of the rally stage?
- Were any personnel or resource changes made when law enforcement apparently didn’t have enough manpower to secure the roof that the shooter used?
- Why did the Secret Service originally lie about denying Trump’s team the additional security it requested?
- Who oversaw and signed off on security plans for Donald Trump’s rallies? Cheatle said it wasn’t her, nor would she identify any responsible parties.
- Was Crooks working alone?
- Why didn’t Cheatle provide any audio recordings from the day of the incident?
- Why was the not-so-“sloped” roof deemed too dangerous for officers after it was identified as a vulnerability by Secret Service?
- Does the agency believe an hour is too short a time to prevent a 20-year-old, armed with a rifle, from scaling a building, accessing a rooftop, and firing at the former president from less than 150 yards away?
- Have investigators confirmed, via the recovered spent shell casings and the known trajectory of the bullets, that the shooter on the rooftop fired each one?
- Why wasn’t Trump kept off the stage after agents identified Crooks? Was it negligence or nefariousness?
- What line of communication was used with all law enforcement on-site?
- Was Trump’s team on the ground informed of suspicious activity? If not, why?
- When the agents saw the shooter take out a range finder, was someone assigned to keep watch of him? If not, why not?
- At that time, was the shooter’s status changed from suspicious to threat?
- Are field agents trained in identifying threats? Is DEI training prioritized over threat identification?
- Was Cheatle’s prior experience enough to lead the Secret Service?
- Did Cheatle get the job based on merit or because of her friendship with First Lady Jill Biden?
- Are Secret Service agents permitted to use encrypted messaging apps on their personal phones to communicate with colleagues? If not, why was Cheatle allowed to do this?
- What changes have been made within the agency aside from Cheatle’s resignation?
