The Patriot Post® · Secret Service Director Blames Sloped Roof
Kim Cheatle, the former senior director of global security at Pepsi and the current director of our nation’s Secret Service, is taking the near-assassination of Donald Trump on her watch very seriously. So seriously, in fact, that she sat down for a chat Monday with ABC News’s Pierre Thomas.
Cheatle owes her current role largely to the relationship she developed with First Lady Jill Biden during her eight years as second lady in the Obama administration. Perhaps that experience guided her determination that the attempted assassination was “unacceptable” and that “it’s something that shouldn’t happen again.”
Whew. What a relief it is for Trump supporters to hear that it “shouldn’t happen again.” And by that, we assume she means that a guy with a semiautomatic rifle and a rangefinder shouldn’t be able to set up shop on a rooftop just 130 yards from a former president and just start firing away.
No wonder Cheatle refuses to resign. The bullet hole in Trump’s ear is something that shouldn’t happen again. “It was obviously a situation that, as a Secret Service agent, no one ever wants to occur in their career,” she said.
Asked by Thomas whether she bears responsibility for the jaw-slackening incompetence, Cheatle said, “The buck stops with me. I am the director of the Secret Service, and I need to make sure that we are performing a review and that we are giving resources to our personnel as necessary.” (Has anyone else noticed that the ol’ “buck stops with me” trope is what all Demo-bureaucrats trot out when they know they’re not going to be fired or forced to resign?)
Perhaps next time, she’ll assign the “A” team to the former and likely future president, who is at once the most beloved and reviled man in American history, rather than sticking him with a clueless crew that came within a literal inch of getting him killed. Or perhaps not.
As for why there were apparently no agents on that layup-distance rooftop, it’s because they were inside the building rather than atop it. “That building, in particular, has a sloped roof at its highest point,” she said, stressing the importance of the safety of her agents.
Say what? That ridiculous excuse alone should be a firing offense.
Indeed, it looked to be about as sloped as a wheelchair ramp. “And so, you know,” she added, “there’s a safety factor that would be considered there that we wouldn’t want to put somebody up on a sloped roof. And so, you know, the decision was made to secure the building from inside.”
Securing it from the inside, eh? How did that work out?
In his analysis on Monday, our Mark Alexander noted yet another failure of Trump’s Secret Service detail: The building immediately behind the shooter’s position was the highest overwatch point at this venue, and yet, shockingly, there were no counter-snipers on that rooftop above the assassin’s position.
As for that treacherously sloped roof: It didn’t seem to bother the would-be assassin — the guy who fired multiple rounds toward Trump and missed killing him by an inch but did manage to kill a heroic husband and father, Corey Comperatore, while gravely wounding two other men. And an even more sloped roof didn’t seem to bother the Secret Service sniper team which appeared to have Thomas Crooks in their sights but inexplicably waited until he began his murderous assault before engaging him.
“The shooter was actually identified as a potential person of suspicion,” Cheatle said, referring to the snipers who were in the building, took pictures of Crooks, and radioed their command post about him beforehand. “Unfortunately, with the rapid succession of how things unfolded, by the time that individual was eventually located, they were on the rooftop and were able to fire off at the former president.”
We presume Cheatle means “he was,” not “they were.” Where do we find these DEI hires, anyway? Cheatle can’t even get her pronouns and antecedents to agree. How on earth can she be expected to run an agency charged with protecting past and present presidents and their families?
In an earlier statement, Cheatle called the shooting “a senseless act of violence,” and she reassured an anxious nation that she’s on the case: “Since the shooting,” she said, “I have been in constant contact with Secret Service personnel in Pennsylvania. … I have also been coordinating with the protective detail for former President Trump and have briefed President Biden on the details of the incident. The Secret Service is working with all involved Federal, state and local agencies to understand what happened, how it happened, and how we can prevent an incident like this from ever taking place again.”
What happened? It’s complicated, but The Federalist’s Sean Davis breaks it down: “They kept the rooftop open, watched the shooter, kept Trump on the stage, and didn’t do a damn thing until after he had been shot. And we’re supposed to believe it was an innocent oopsie?”
The more we learn about the cascading lapses of this incident, the more deeply disturbing it becomes.
If Cheatle thinks she’s out of the woods, she’s sorely mistaken. House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer wants to know who knew what and when. He also says he’ll subpoena her to appear at the panel’s July 22 hearing, which should keep her from getting cold feet and refusing to show.
In addition to her congressional appearance, Cheatle will have to answer to the Office of Inspector General for the Department of Homeland Security, which has opened an investigation into this catastrophic lapse. According to Fox News, “Joseph V. Cuffari, who was appointed as the inspector general by former President Trump in 2019, opened the investigation.”
All these investigations are well and good, but not if they don’t end in accountability. And if there’s one thing we know about Joe Biden, it’s that he doesn’t hold his people accountable.
Updated to include additional analysis on the Secret Service’s catastrophic failure.