To say that Kimberly Cheatle is not a popular woman right now is perhaps the understatement of the year — and in a year where there’s no paucity of them.
Cheatle, the director of the Secret Service, first became a household name in the hours following the shooting Saturday of former President Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.
The agency she leads came under fire for not preventing the assassination attempt, especially after reports emerged that a suspicious person, later identified as gunman Thomas Michael Crooks, had been spotted by some at the rally who alerted law enforcement.
Cheatle made things worse when she sat down with ABC News and, while calling the lapse in security “unacceptable,” claimed that Crooks was tracked down in “a very short period of time.” On Tuesday, she made things even worse yet by declaring that the “sloped roof” Crooks fired from presented “a safety factor” where “we wouldn’t want to put somebody up on a sloped roof.”
And it wasn’t just the assassination attempt. Cheatle’s emphasis on diversity while at the Secret Service — including pushing for a 30 percent female workforce by 2030 — had been the subject of criticism within the agency.
This criticism only intensified after an incident earlier this year when a female agent — whose background would typically have been disqualifying for employment as a Secret Service agent, sources maintained — had what appeared to be a mental breakdown at Joint Base Andrews as she was preparing to protect Vice President Kamala Harris on a flight aboard Air Force Two. The agent was subdued, disarmed, handcuffed and removed from the base.
Cheatle maintains she plans to stay on. Much like her boss, Joe Biden, however, those protestations ring somewhat hollow, particularly after a viral showdown Wednesday between the director and lawmakers at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.
The video was posted to the social media platform X by, among others, Tennessee GOP Sen. Marsha Blackburn, one of those who confronted Cheatle.
Cheatle would eventually flee the scene, but not without several lawmakers in tow.
Should jail be on the table for Cheatle after everything that has come to light since the assassination attempt?
Not much could be gleaned due to the background noise and crosstalk, but several things could be heard from the conversation — which, according to CNN, included Blackburn and Wyoming Sen. John Barrasso.
“Every one of us has questions and we want to get answers,” a man — who seems to be Barrasso, although it’s difficult to tell because the video is chaotic, poorly lit and poorly shot — tells Cheatle at the outset of the clip. “But we didn’t get any responses from you.”
He added he was “very disappointed” in Cheatle.
“We have called — I have called for your resignation,” he continued. Cheatle, he said, had 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.”
Barrasso accused Cheatle of “stonewalling,” and Blackburn echoed some of the same rhetoric.
“This was an assassination attempt! You owe the people answers. You owe President Trump answers!” she said, noting that “an hour out, you had a suspicious person.”
Roughly two minutes into the video, Cheatle says that “I don’t think this is the point to have this discussion” and begins to make signs of pulling away. She also noted that the area was a suite for those watching the convention, no place to have a confrontation — at least in her eyes.
The senators were having none of it, however.
“We can find a place to go, right now,” one said.
But, no: Cheatle made her getaway, albeit with GOP lawmakers in tow. She tried, unsuccessfully, to completely ignore them:
🚨FULL VIDEO: Secret Service Director REFUSES to answer to the American people. pic.twitter.com/MPVOke5zhY
— Marsha Blackburn (@VoteMarsha) July 18, 2024
Barasso and Blackburn described the run-in in a video posted to X immediately afterward.
BREAKING: We just confronted the Secret Service Director at the RNC Convention.
She can run, but she can’t hide from accountability. pic.twitter.com/i7NUIpGeLC
— Marsha Blackburn (@VoteMarsha) July 18, 2024
While a confrontation at the Republican National Convention might seem a bit dramatic, consider the fact that lawmakers have been apparently unable to get any sort of substantive answers out of the Secret Service since the attack on Saturday.
GOP Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who was on a call Wednesday with all 100 senators and Secret Service and FBI officials, told Fox News that the feds were doing all they could to obfuscate.
“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,” Cruz said Wednesday.
“That detail they just omitted.”
Unfortunately for Cheatle and the rest of the Secret Service brass, they’re going to have to answer for this — even if they leave their jobs, voluntarily or forcibly. And that should happen anyway.
