Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle resigns

CNN

By Evan Perez, Lauren Fox, Tierney Sneed, Holmes Lybrand and Whitney Wild, CNN

(CNN) — US Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle has tendered her resignation amid scrutiny of security lapses related to the recent assassination attempt of former President Donald Trump, sources tell CNN.

The move comes as lawmakers and an internal government watchdog move forward with investigations into the agency’s handling of Trump’s protection and how a gunman came close to the killing the 2024 Republican presidential candidate at a rally in Pennsylvania this month.

Cheatle said in her resignation letter that she made the “difficult” decision to leave the agency “with a heavy heart” and that she doesn’t want her departure to distract agents from their mission.

“In light of recent events, it is with a heavy heart that, I have made the difficult decision to step down as your Director,” Cheatle wrote. She acknowledged that on July 13, the day of the shooting, the agency “fell short” of its mission to “to protect our nation’s leaders.”

Secret Service Deputy Director Ronald Rowe has been tapped to lead the agency, the Department of Homeland Security announced.

In a statement, President Joe Biden said he and first lady Jill Biden are “grateful” for Cheatle’s decades of public service.

“As a leader, it takes honor, courage, and incredible integrity to take full responsibility for an organization tasked with one of the most challenging jobs in public service,” Biden said of Cheatle.

There have been bipartisan calls in Congress for Cheatle’s resignation and a push by Republican lawmakers to impeach her. Lawmakers were particularly incensed after her appearance in front of the House Oversight Committee on Monday, where she was unwilling to answer many of the committee’s questions.

During her House Oversight appearance, Cheatle acknowledged that there were “significant” and “colossal” problems with the security at the rally, but still rebuffed demands for her resignation.

“I think I am the best person to lead the Secret Service at this time,” Cheatle said Monday.

House Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters that the resignation is “overdue.”

“Now we have to pick up the pieces,” Johnson said. “We have to rebuild the American people’s faith and trust in the Secret Service as an agency. It has an incredibly important responsibility in protecting presidents, former presidents, and other officials in the executive branch, and we’ve got a lot of work to do.”

In the initial wake of the shooting, Cheatle was emphatic that she would not step down. Cheatle was appointed by Biden to lead the Secret Service in 2022.

In an interview with CNN last week, Cheatle said that the agency was “solely responsible” for the design and implementation of security at the Pennsylvania rally site, where the now-deceased gunman fired shots at Trump from an unsecured rooftop just a few hundred feet from the rally stage.

A bullet hit Trump’s ear, and the incident left one rallygoer dead and others injured.

As more has become known about the circumstances around the attempted attack, the Secret Service has been questioned about how it carried its protection of Trump that day, including the failure to control access to the rooftop and how the agency handled information, passed along by local law enforcement before the shooting, that identified the would-be assassin as a person acting suspiciously around the rally grounds.

The Secret Service and the Pennsylvania law enforcement, which assisted in the rally security efforts, have sometimes been at odds in their accounts of what happened and who was responsible for the lapses.

Cheatle had pledged her agency’s full cooperation with the congressional and internal government examinations of Secret Service’s approach to that day.

Cheatle had left a job managing Global Security at PepsiCo to take the USSS director post and before her stint in the private sector, had served in the Secret Service for 27 years.

This story has been updated with additional developments.

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