US Secret Service chief resigns due to failures in attack against Trump | USA Elections

The head of the US Secret Service, Kimberly Cheatle, finally resigned this Tuesday, 10 days after the attack against Donald Trump, which she herself defined as “the biggest operational failure of the agency in decades”. This resignation came the day after her presence at the Capitol, during which she had to listen to repeated calls from legislators from both parties for her to resign.

“The Secret Service’s sole mission is to protect our nation’s leaders. And on July 13, we failed,” Cheatle explained to the congressional committee that questioned him on Monday. He also took “full responsibility” for what happened that day, but refused to resign because, he said, he feels “proud beyond words” of the way his people responded after the shooting. Cheatle, who has been in the military for three decades and worked to protect Joe Biden when he was vice president, held a political position and had authority over 8,000 agents.

He broke the news to his employees in an email he sent and received this Tuesday the new York Times. In it he elaborates the idea that during Trump’s rally in Butler (Pennsylvania) on July 13, in which the former president narrowly escaped death, the Secret Service “did not fulfill its mission.” As a result, the message continues, Cheatle assumes consequences. That day, one of the participants in the election event, a volunteer firefighter named Corey Comperter, was shot by the attacker, Thomas Crooks, a 20-year-old man whose motives are unclear, while two others were injured. Their lives are out of danger.

During Monday’s hearing, a public embarrassment that lasted several hours, Cheatle offered no relief, saying he believed he was “the best person in the United States to do this job at this time.” In a rare display of bipartisanship at such a time, leaders of both parties united to convince him otherwise. At the end of the session on Capitol Hill, Reps. Jamie Raskin, D-Maryland, and James Comer, R-Kentucky, the two ranking representatives on the committee, signed a joint letter calling on Cheatle to step down and take responsibility.

Before writing that letter, he had been asked several times to resign from his position. For example, California Congressman Ro Khanna asked him if he thought his Secret Service failure was comparable to the failure that made possible the 1981 assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan in Washington. He said yes without hesitation. To which Khanna replied: “Do you know what the man who was in office at the time did? I’ll tell you: He resigned.”

One of the toughest was Ohio Republican Mike Turner. “Since Donald Trump is alive, and thank God he is alive, you are the picture of incompetence,” Turner told Cheatle, who demanded that President Biden fire him if he did not agree to resign. “If Donald Trump had been murdered, he would be guilty now.” Another Republican, Nancy Mace, went straight to disqualification when she was called a “piece of shit,” while a Colorado ultra, Lauren Boebert, extracted a confession from him that Cheatle had called Trump after the attack, and apologized to him.

(Breaking news. Will update soon.)

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