Secret Service chief berated and asked by US lawmakers to quit over Trump rally shooting 

WASHINGTON – Secret Service director Kimberly Cheatle on July 22

faced bipartisan calls for her resignation,

after a disastrous hours-long congressional hearing in which she declined to answer basic questions about the attempted assassination of former president Donald Trump.

Ms Cheatle declined to say how many agents were protecting Trump

when a gunman shot at him at a July 13 campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania,

or who decided to leave a nearby rooftop out of the event’s security perimeter.

Nor would she tell members of the House Oversight Committee why Secret Service agents were not aware until the last seconds that people in the crowd had seen a gunman on that roof.

At times, Ms Cheatle seemed less informed than the lawmakers quizzing her. When the right-wing Georgia Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene asked for a detailed timeline of events, Ms Cheatle said she did not have one.

“I have a timeline that does not have specifics,” she said, eliciting laughter from the room.

By the hearing’s end, many of the committee’s Democrats – usually defensive of their party’s appointees – had also swung sharply against Ms Cheatle.

Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the committee’s top Democrat, said he “did not see any daylight between the members of the two parties today at the hearing, in terms of our bafflement and outrage”.

Mr Raskin joined the committee’s Republican chairman James Comer of Kentucky in calling for her resignation.

“The director has lost the confidence of Congress, at a very urgent and tender moment in the history of the country,” Mr Raskin said.

During the hearing, 15 lawmakers – 12 Republicans and three Democrats – suggested that Ms Cheatle should resign or be fired. Ms Cheatle said repeatedly that she did not intend to resign and that she was the best person to lead the agency during a period of intense scrutiny.

“I believe that the country deserves answers,” she said. “And I am committed to finding those answers.”

The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the Secret Service, did not respond to a request for comment about the hearing.

Trump’s ear was bloodied in the assault, and a rally attendee was fatally wounded. Two other attendees were injured. A Secret Service sniper shot and killed the gunman,

later identified as Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20,

from Bethel Park, Pennsylvania.

Ms Cheatle spent more than two decades at the Secret Service, left in 2019 to take a job at PepsiCo, and then returned in 2022 after US President Joe Biden appointed her director of the agency.

Her task on Monday: Explain what she called the “single greatest operational failure” of the Secret Service in decades.

It was a difficult job from the start. Ms Cheatle sat alone at the witness table, confronting a committee that included several members who had already called for her to step down.

“I will be (as) transparent as possible when I speak with you,” Ms Cheatle said in her opening remarks.

But rather than quell the concerns about her ability to handle the crisis, she frustrated lawmakers from the first question by declining to give details about the Secret Service’s preparation for the Butler rally.

Mr Comer, going first, wanted to know about the warehouse roof that the shooter used to target Trump. He said: “Can you answer why the Secret Service didn’t place a single agent on the roof?”

She did not.

She said: “We are still looking into the advance process, and the decisions that were made.” In many of her responses, she said that she was waiting for reports and did not want to say something that might not be accurate.

Other questioners ran through – and through and through – the biggest questions about that day.

How many agents were there to protect Trump? Who chose to keep the warehouse roof outside of the security perimeter, despite its obvious advantages for a would-be sniper? Why did the Secret Service not notice Crooks when he climbed atop that roof with a gun?

Each time, Ms Cheatle declined to say.

She also declined to answer more minor questions.

How many times did the gunman fire? How did Crooks get his rifle on the roof? Those kinds of questions, she said, should be directed to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which is handling the criminal investigation.

Ms Cheatle even appeared unwilling to answer questions about herself, such as how long she had prepared for the hearing.

“I’m not sure of the date that I got the letter asking me to be here,” she said.

“What are you sure of?” asked Representative Lisa McClain, a Republican from Michigan. “Are you sure of the colour of your hair? Are you sure of the colour of your suit?”

At a more typical hearing, the President’s party might have lobbed easy questions to bolster a presidential appointee. But by the end of Monday’s hearing, Democrats had become nearly as critical of Ms Cheatle as Republicans.

Representative Jared Moskowitz, a Democrat from Florida, compared her testimony to a hearing that featured university presidents late in 2023 in which they dodged questions about anti-Semitism on their campuses. Two of the presidents later resigned.

“That’s how this is going for you,” Mr Moskowitz said. “This is where this is headed.” He asked if Ms Cheatle would commit to firing any employee found to be responsible for security lapses at the Trump event.

“I don’t have an answer,” Ms Cheatle said.

Ms Cheatle was repeatedly pressed as to why the Secret Service allowed Trump to take the stage, even as the local police were investigating a “suspicious person” in the crowd – later discovered to be Crooks.

She said the Secret Service did not initially consider Crooks a “threat” because he appeared to be unarmed. Lawmakers asked when agents realised he had become a threat, given that people in the crowd had spotted him on the warehouse roof with a rifle at least a minute before he opened fire.

In response to a question from Representative Russell Fry, a Republican from South Carolina, Ms Cheatle said the Secret Service became aware of that threat “seconds before the gunfire started”.

Mr Fry seemed relieved to get a response: “My gosh, we actually had a few questions we got answered today.”

In separate testimony, Ms Cheatle said she had expressed remorse to Trump after the incident. Asked by Representative Lauren Boebert, a Republican from Colorado, whether she had apologised to the former president directly, Ms Cheatle answered that she had. NYTIMES