The head of the Secret Service resigned Tuesday amid mounting criticism over security lapses during the assassination attempt on former President Trump.
Kimberly Cheatle had faced growing calls to resign from both Democrats and Republicans.
“I take full responsibility for the security breach,” she said in an email to staff on Tuesday. “In light of recent events, it is with great regret that I have made the difficult decision to resign as director.”
In a startling admission Monday, he said local authorities watched and photographed the man who shot Trump 18 minutes before the former president took the stage at a rally in Pennsylvania.
It was one of several security lapses revealed at a congressional hearing on what Cheatle described as the agency’s “most significant operational failure” in decades.
The new information sparked outrage among lawmakers and a rare moment of agreement between House Oversight Committee Chairman James R. Comer Jr. (R-Ky.) and ranking member Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), who called on him to resign.
“I also saw no difference between members of the two parties in the audience today in terms of our bewilderment and outrage at the shocking operational failures that led to this disaster,” Raskin said.
On July 13, at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania, 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks fired eight shots at Trump from a rooftop, hitting him in the ear, killing one bystander and wounding two others. Ten seconds after the first shot, Crooks was killed by a Secret Service sniper.
But questions from members of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee about how a man with a rifle could have gotten within shooting range of the former president (on a rooftop uncovered by the Secret Service, no less) went mostly unanswered.
