Secret Service director Kimberly Cheatle said her agency failed in its mission to protect former president Donald Trump during a highly contentious congressional hearing with politicians of both major political parties demanding she resign over security failures.
In her first congressional hearing over the July 13 assassination attempt, Ms Cheatle repeatedly angered officials by evading questions, citing ongoing investigations.
She called the attempt on Mr Trump’s life the Secret Service’s “most significant operational failure” in decades.
Ms Cheatle acknowledged that the Secret Service was told about a suspicious person “between two and five times” before the shooting.
And Ms Cheatle said that the roof from which the shooter fired had been identified as a potential vulnerability days before the rally.
Yet, Ms Cheatle gave no indication she intends to resign even as she said she takes “full responsibility” for any security lapses at the Pennsylvania rally.
Ms Cheatle vowed to “move heaven and earth” to ensure that nothing like it ever happens again.
“The Secret Service’s solemn mission is to protect our nation’s leaders. On July 13, we failed,” Ms Cheatle said.
Politicians peppered Ms Cheatle with questions about how the gunman could get so close to the Republican presidential nominee when he was supposed to be carefully guarded and about why Mr Trump was allowed to take the stage after local law enforcement had identified Thomas Matthew Crooks as suspicious.
Ms Cheatle acknowledged that Crooks had been seen by local law enforcement before the shooting with a rangefinder, a small device resembling binoculars that hunters use to measure distance from a target.
She said the Secret Service would have paused the rally if agents had been told there was an “actual threat,” but she said there is a difference between someone identified as suspicious and someone identified as a true threat.
Asked about why there were no agents on the roof where the shooter was located or if the Secret Service used drones to monitor the area, Ms Cheatle said she is still waiting for the investigation to play out, prompting groans and outbursts from members on the committee.
“Director Cheatle, because Donald Trump is alive, and thank God he is, you look incompetent,” said Rep Mike Turner. “If he were killed you would look culpable.”
Ms Cheatle, who has spent nearly three decades at the agency, remained defiant that she was the “right person” to lead the Secret Service despite the failures.
Rep Ro Khanna noted that the Secret Service director who presided over the agency when there was an attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan later stepped down.
“The one thing we have to have in this country are agencies that transcend politics and have the confidence of independents, Democrats, Republicans, progressives and conservatives,” Mr Khanna said, adding that the Secret Service was no longer one of those agencies.
Mr Trump was wounded in the ear, one rally attendee was killed and two other attendees were injured after Crooks climbed atop the roof of a nearby building and opened fire with an AR-style rifle shortly after Mr Trump started speaking at the July 13 rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.
The Secret Service has acknowledged it denied some requests by Mr Trump’s campaign for increased security at his events in the years before the assassination attempt. But Ms Cheatle said that there were “no assets denied” for the rally.
