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The Secret Service director has changed course and will now testify before Congress to address growing concerns about the recent assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump at a Pennsylvania rally.
According to The Hill, Director Kimberly Cheatle has agreed to comply with a congressional subpoena and will appear before the House Oversight and Accountability Committee on Monday.
“We are committed to better understanding what happened before, during and after the assassination attempt of former President Trump to ensure it never happens again,” the Secret Service said in a Friday statement.
Cheatle had initially agreed to testify earlier in the week, but committee chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) stated that the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the Secret Service, had intervened to prevent her testimony.
Subsequently, Comer issued a subpoena on Wednesday requiring Cheatle to appear on Monday. In response, the DHS’s assistant secretary for legislative affairs expressed dissatisfaction with the committee’s swift issuance of the subpoena in a letter.
The department also asked if Cheatle could testify later in the week, but this request was declined by the committee, as reported by The Hill.
“Americans demand answers from Director Kimberly Cheatle about the Secret Service’s historic security failures that led to the attempted assassination of President Trump, murder of an innocent victim, and harm to others in the crowd. We look forward to Director Cheatle’s testimony on Monday, July 22 to deliver the transparency and accountability Americans deserve,” Comer said in a statement after the director agreed to appear.
Following an unclassified briefing by Cheatle and FBI Director Christopher Wray to House and Senate members on Wednesday, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) demanded that President Biden dismiss Cheatle.
“But the oversight here, the mistakes, the ineptitude, whatever it is, was inexcusable,” Johnson said on Fox News. “They did not give satisfactory answers to some very important questions. And some of it needs to be in a classified setting, I suppose.”
In the briefing, Cheatle told members of Congress that the Secret Service had flagged the shooter as suspicious one hour before he attempted the assassination.
Dan Bongino, a conservative pundit, author, and entrepreneur who served as a Secret Service agent for 12 years, also urged the agency’s current director to resign immediately after the near-assassination.
Describing the attack at a Saturday rally in Butler, Pa., an “apocalyptic security failure,” Bongino, who once served on the protective details of then-Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama after a stint as an instructor at the Secret Service Training Academy in Maryland, was responding to a statement the agency put out claiming officials “added protective resources & technology & capabilities as part of the increased campaign travel tempo.”
He continued to criticize his former employer for failing to accept responsibility for the incident, which left Trump vulnerable despite the prior observations made by bystanders, local police, and Secret Service agents at the scene that should have prompted intervention against the 20-year-old shooter, Thomas Crooks.
“This is the best technology we have’? Really? To let a sniper 150 yards away from the potential next president shoot a piece of his ear off?” Bongino told Fox News. “Kimberly Cheatle has failed Donald Trump, and honestly failed Joe Biden too.”
He added that the agency’s counter-sniper teams did not manage to confront Crooks before he fired off multiple shots.
“We’re trained out to 1,000 yards in the Secret Service with the counter-sniper team. How did they miss someone at most one-fifth of the way there? It doesn’t make any sense. And even worse, it’s broad daylight on a white roof,” Bongino added.
The Secret Service has strongly denied reports that Trump’s security detail requested reinforcements and were denied. However, Bongino asserts that he can prove otherwise. “I can tell you actual quotes,” he said on Sunday.
“I can tell you, and absolutely confirm, from the horse’s mouth, from multiple people … there have been repeated requests to increase the security footprint, around not just the residences of Donald Trump, but the body itself,” the former Secret Service agent said. “And they have been rebuffed.”
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