Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle’s testimony got underway before the House Oversight and Accountability Committee on Monday.
After the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump on July 13 at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, many members of Congress and outraged Americans alike are looking to Cheatle for answers as to just how her agency failed to protect Trump, who needed a miracle to escape with his life.
Chief among those questions raised about the attempt on the former president’s life involved why the Secret Service did not secure the rooftop from which would-be assassin Thomas Matthew Crooks opened fire.
In an ABC News interview on July 15, two days after the shooting, Cheatle made the incredibly lame excuse that the roof was sloped, presenting a problem for agents.
“That building in particular has a sloped roof, at its highest point,” she said. “And so there’s a safety factor that would be considered there that we wouldn’t want to put somebody up on a sloped roof. And so the decision was made to secure the building from inside.”
During her testimony on Monday, Cheatle rightfully endured lawmakers’ scorn for this explanation for a horrific lapse that resulted in one man — Trump supporter Corey Comperatore — being killed and three others, including Trump, being injured.
Texas Republican Rep. Pat Fallon grilled her about the concern over securing the roof.
“Do you remember in an ABC interview you did that you didn’t have people on the roof of the AGR building because you were worried about safety because of the slope?” he said.
Cheatle answered in the affirmative.
The congressman then asked her if the Secret Service had a written policy concerning sloped roofs, to which Cheatle answered they did not.
“So why did you act like there was one?” he shot back.
🚨 BOMBSHELL! The SS Counter-Snipers were on a Roof STEEPER than the Shooter.
This is absolutely damning… and destroys the excuse of a “sloped roof” being too dangerous to have agents on the roof.
We are watching a cover-up folks.https://t.co/66t0YkCCZ2 pic.twitter.com/mXIfiHcEmy
— MJTruthUltra (@MJTruthUltra) July 22, 2024
Fallon went on to mention varying degrees to which roofs can be sloped before pointing out the absurdity of the countersnipers protecting Trump on a roof with a steeper slope than the one Cheatle failed to have secured.
He called her reasons for not securing the roof “pathetic excuses” and “cow dung.”
The congressman vented his rage further by mentioning that he, not being formally trained with firearms, was able to re-create the shots taken by Crooks and successfully hit the target fatally 15 out of 16 times.
Cheatle was completely exposed in this hearing.
Will Cheatle be the very first person Trump fires if he returns to the White House?
There is no plausible reason for what happened that day in Butler, and the average onlooker doesn’t even need to know that much to understand why.
The agents who shot Crooks were on a sloped roof, yet the sloped roof the would-be assassin was on was not secured because of its slope.
To call her excuse poor is an understatement.
A father and husband died.
The former president nearly died, which would have sent our country into chaos.
Cheatle must never again be trusted with anyone’s safety.
