July 23 (UPI) — Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle resigned Tuesday as a bipartisan House Task Force was announced to seek answers regarding the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump.
Cheatle informed Secret Service employees of her decision to step down in an email to employees obtained by CNN, The New York Times and ABC News, in which she said she would leave the agency with a “heavy heart” but did not want to let the calls for her resignation to “be a distraction.”
“The Secret Service’s solemn mission is to protect our nation’s leaders and financial infrastructure. On July 13, we fell short on that mission,” she wrote. “The scrutiny over the last week has been intense and will continue to remain as our operational temp increases. As your director, I take full responsibility for the security lapse.”
President Joe Biden issued a statement saying he and first lady Jill Biden were “grateful” to Cheatle as she “selflessly dedicated and risked her life to protect our nation” throughout her decades of public service.
“We especially thank her for answering the call to lead the Secret Service during our administration and we are grateful for her service to our family,” Biden said.
“As a leader, it takes honor, courage, and incredible integrity to take full responsibility for an organization tasked with one of the most challenging jobs in public service.”
Biden added that an independent review into the assassination attempt that he announced was still underway.
Cheatle, who has served as the agency’s 27th director since September 2022, was on Capitol Hill Monday to face a heated public grilling from both Republican and Democrat lawmakers during a House Oversight Committee hearing seeking answers to what is now an ongoing investigation by multiple federal agencies.
Cheatle’s announcement came as House Speaker Rep. Mike Johnson, R-La., and Minority Leader Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., formally announced their own task force to investigate the incident.
“The security failures that allowed an assassination attempt on Donald Trump’s life are shocking,” the leaders said in a joint statement.
Johnson and Jeffries said the new House Task Force will be made up of six Democrats and seven Republicans in response to what they said were “bipartisan demands for answers” to where Secret Service agents had failed on July in Butler, Pa. during the shooting at the campaign rally of the now Republican presidential nominee.
A resolution will be introduced in the House this week to officially establish the Task Force and its members, according to the joint statement.
The speaker last week in Milwaukee called for Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle to resign only days after her agents killed 20-year-old Thomas Crooks, who shot at the ex-president with an AR-15 style weapon.
This bipartisan Task Force is expected to use “all investigative authority” given to it by Congress.
The two House leaders agreed the panel will “be empowered” with subpoena authority and will “move quickly to find the facts, ensure accountability, and make certain such failures never happen again.”
Jeffries and Johnson revealed the Task Force goals will be threefold with the overall aim to “understand what went wrong” on July 13, prevent any such event from occurring in the future and to recommend ideas for reform to relevant government agencies and write “any necessary legislation to implement the reforms.”
On Monday, Cheatle characterized Trump’s assassination attempt as “the most significant operational failure” by the Secret Service “in decades” as she tried to take responsibility for any perceived agency failures and in her leadership.
She also was confronted by Republican senators at the Republican National Convention last week, who recorded and shared video of them calling for her to answer questions about the shooting. And on Saturday, Rep. Brendan Boyle, D-Pa., became the first Democrat to call for Cheatle’s resignation.
“As an agency, we are fully cooperating with the FBI’s investigation, the oversight you have initiated here, and conducting our own internal mission assurance review at my direction,” Cheatle wrote in remarks prior to Monday’s hearing. “Likewise, we will cooperate with the pending external review and the DHS Office of the Inspector General.”
And in another rare joint statement, House Oversight Committee Chair Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., and the committee’s ranking Democrat, Jamie Raskin of Maryland — a vocal Trump critic and integral part of Trump’s two impeachments — both called for Cheatle to resign.
“The United States Secret Service under your leadership failed to protect former President Donald Trump from an assassination attempt that took the life of Corey Comperatore and seriously injured at least two other people,” the two lawmakers wrote.
