Kimberly Cheatle is not popular right now. She’s the Secret Service director and after Trump’s assassination attempt, people want answers or a resignation. The gunman had been spotted easily within 30 minutes of Trump going on stage. The push for diversity in the ranks nearly got a presidential candidate killed. As the diversity hire, she had pushed for 30% females by 2030.
Cheatle might not know
She might not know the answers. She talked out of both sides of her mouth on ABC.
She called the security lapse “unacceptable” and that Crooks was “tracked down in a very short period of time”. She thought the “sloped roof” presented a “safety factor” and that she “wouldn’t want to put somebody up on a sloped roof.”
The criticism got worse when an agent had a mental breakdown at Joint Base Andrews where she was going to protect the vice president on a flight on Air Force Two. The agent had to be subdued, disarmed, handcuffed and removed from the base.
Normally that kind of behavior wouldn’t be accepted and you’d be shown the door. It would disqualify you from being a secret service agent.
Cheatle has refused to step down
But her protests ring hollow, much like her boss, especially after a showdown with lawmakers at the Republican National Convention. She would eventually flee but not without several officials running behind her.
The scene was too chaotic but Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn and Wyoming Senator John Barrasso lit into her. It might have been Barrasso who said, “Every one of us has questions and we want to get answers. But we didn’t get any responses from you. I’m very disappointed in you. We have called — I have called for your resignation.”
Barrasso said Cheatle needed to answer for “allowing [Trump] to go on stage in Pennsylvania, at a time when you’d already been alerted that there was somebody … already identified an hour before, and you allowed him to go on stage.”
Cheatle was stonewalling
Both Senators thought she was doing that. Blackburn emphasized, “This was an assassination attempt! You owe the people answers. You owe President Trump answers! You knew an hour out you had a suspicious person!”
The director tried to back out. “I don’t think this is the point to have this discussion” She didn’t think this was a place to have a confrontation but the Senators were having none of it.
One of them said, “We can find a place to go, right now.” But she ran. The confrontation might seem dramatic but they’ve been unable to get answers from her. The feds are doing everything they can to get in the way. GOP Senator Ted Cruz was on a call of all 100 Senators, Secret Service and FBI. Cruz said,
“It was a 45-minute briefing and they spent 30 minutes just filibustering, walking through all the things they did that day; walking through a detailed timeline of every other factor of what they did in the field, what they did on the stage, what they did backstage — everything except how they didn’t stop a man with a rifle from shooting the former president. That detail they just omitted.”
