At a time when her agency is in disgrace after the very-nearly successful attempt to assassinate former President Donald Trump, Secret Service Director Kim Cheatle is apparently shameless.
In an interview with ABC News broadcast Monday — that can only be described as jaw-dropping — the veteran Secret Service agent and former head of global security for Pepsico made clear two things that most Americans should find disconcerting.
The first is that she apparently had no problem with the fact that a suspicious individual had been spotted on a roof just outside the Trump rally in Butler County, Pennsylvania, roughly a half-hour before Saturday’s the shooting, yet the individual was not located until after shots were actually fired.
The second is that she has no plans to resign her position.
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In a government where accountability mattered, the first statement would be inconceivable. The head of the agency charged with security for presidents and presidential candidates would be outraged at the news that a potential killer had been spotted in exactly the kind of spot an assassin would choose, had been photographed, but had not been found before nearly succeeding in his mission.
And in a world where accountability mattered, the second statement would be moot — Cheatle would have been gone by now.
In the interview with Pierre Thomas, ABC’s chief justice correspondent, Cheatle was big enough to acknowledge that the horrific events of Saturday — a shooting that left one man dead, two critically injured and almost ended the life of potentially the next president of the United States — were “unacceptable.”
Yet she was brazen enough to defend her agency’s performance.
Will the Biden administration ever fire Kim Cheatle?
According to WPXI-TV in Pittsburgh, an eight-member team of emergency services snipers and spotters from neighboring Beaver County, Pennsylvania, was assigned to the rally.
One of its members actually photographed a suspicious man on aroof near the rally, though the report did not specify which roof, and called in the sighting.
That photo was taken at 5:45 p.m., according to WPXI, which reported that sources had confirmed the man was the now-deceased gunman Thomas Crooks, though it was not clear whether he had a gun with him at the time.
According to a timeline published by CNN, Trump took the stage at 6:05 p.m. shots rang out at 6:11 p.m.
So, 26 minutes elapsed between when a suspicious individual was spotted and when that individual tried to murder a once-and-perhaps future president. And what does the director of the agency charged with protecting Trump’s life have to say?
“I don’t have all the details yet, but it was a very short period of time,” she told Thomas, according to ABC.
“Seeking that person out, finding them, identifying them, and eventually neutralizing them took place in a very short period of time, and it makes it very difficult.”
Of course, it’s difficult. No adult expects the Secret Service to be superheroes.
But the thing is, the Secret Service — including Kimberly Cheatle — gets paid to do things like monitor political rallies, identify suspicious individuals and stop them before they commit murder.
That means assessing where threats are likely to arise — say, high points like roofs where an individual hoping to get off a kill shot might place himself — and making sure those areas are covered.
In this case, according to WPXI, local law enforcement had spotted such an individual on a roof — even taking a picture of him in the process. The fact that a roof that would have a line of sight on the stage had been left unguarded had to have made finding the individual a lot more difficult.
Somewhere in her dissembling heart, Cheatle has to know that. The woman spent 27 years with the Secret Service before leaving the agency for a new title — and probably much bigger money — with Pepsico, where she served from 2019 to 2022.
She sounded like she knew what she was talking about when she told Thomas that Saturday’s assassination attempt was “obviously a situation that as a Secret Service agent, no one ever wants to occur in their career.”
No, no self-respecting security professional would want to be part of an operation where the principal protectee is saved from a brutal death by sheer chance — or the hand of God.
And the individual who was in charge of such an operation — an operation that disgraced the Secret Service and embarrassed the nation in front of the whole world — should have the decency to accept responsibility for a shocking failure, and at least offer a resignation over it.
(She could have at least taken the chance. President Joe Biden probably wouldn’t have accepted it anyway.)
“The buck stops with me,” Cheatle told Thomas.
But her actions — or lack of actions — speak much, much louder than her words.
