The Orange County Register
Anaheim, California (TNS)
Accountability is crucial to public service. Secret Service Director Kimberly A. Cheatle was right to resign Tuesday after her disastrous, bipartisan grilling on Monday before the House Oversight Committee. She was answering questions about the lax security that led to the near assassination of former President Donald Trump at a Pennsylvania campaign rally on July 13.
Especially effective was Jaimie Raskin of Maryland, the committee’s top Democrat and a longtime caustic critic of Trump’s policies while in office and during his re-election campaign. In calling for her resignation, Raskin insisted, “The director has lost the confidence of Congress, at a very urgent and tender moment in the history of the country.” He was joined in that call by committee Chairman James R. Comer, R-Kentucky.
As she began her testimony, Cheatle pledged, “I will be as transparent as possible when I speak with you.” But she wasn’t transparent at all.
A key question everyone has been asking was why the roof of a building just 148 yards away from Trump was left uncovered, allowing attempted assassin Thomas Matthew Crooks to climb up there and begin shooting with his AR-15-style semi-automatic rifle.
Comer asked, “Can you answer why the Secret Service didn’t place a single agent on the roof?” The question was repeated by other panel members, but she didn’t answer. Another Democrat, Rep. Maxwell Frost of Florida, asked about audience members who pointed to Crooks on the roof. She responded, “I don’t have an exact number to share with you today, but for what I’ve been able to discern, somewhere between two and five times there was some sort of communication about a suspicious individual to the Secret Service.”
At this critical time with so much going on 15 weeks before the Nov. 5 election, President Biden now needs to appoint a seasoned, tough Secret Service official to take charge of this troubled agency. And investigations need to continue into why this near-tragedy struck and correcting the agency’s failures.
