In the aftermath of the failed assassination attempt against former President Donald Trump , questions are increasingly being asked about the colossal security failure. Trump, a former president and the 2024 presidential front-runner, was very nearly killed.
Someone, whether a police officer or a Secret Service agent, should have been guarding the building from the roof of which Thomas Matthew Crooks fired his rifle at Trump. Secret Service personnel inside that building had noticed Crooks behaving strangely before he climbed on the roof. The Secret Service command post should have at a minimum conducted a "post check" to ensure Crooks was not a threat.
Facing pressure to resign, Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle hasn't helped her cause. She claimed the reason no officer was stationed on the roof was that it was sloped. She told ABC News, "That building in particular has a sloped roof at its highest point. And so, you know, there's a safety factor that would be considered there that we wouldn't want to put somebody up on a sloped roof."
A decision was made to secure the building from the inside, Cheatle added.
This excuse does not bear a moment's scrutiny. Even if the building was secured from the inside, roof access was not secure. That is an unquestionable security failure: Secret Service protocol is to deny prospective assassins lines of sight to a target as far as is possible and practical. The slope of the roof was very shallow, easily usable by security officers, and other Secret Service officers, including the counter-sniper team that shot and killed Crooks, were on another sloped roof nearby.
The House Oversight Committee has subpoenaed Cheatle to testify to it before next Tuesday. She will face questions both on the assassination attempt and her prioritization of diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives that may have compromised genuine security. Critics say the director has pushed these initiatives rather than the Secret Service's actual mission.
There's no question the Secret Service is a struggling agency. Its agents are exhausted by frequent, short-notice travel and extensive overtime work. But as with her predecessors, Cheatle has adopted a "can do" attitude in the face of these challenges, pressing personnel to succeed with existing resources rather than raising the alarm that it is being asked to do too much.
Its mission is vast. The Secret Service protects dozens of domestic officials, some of whom do not face sufficient security threats to require full-time 24/7 protection. The agency is also responsible for protecting foreign diplomatic posts and personnel in the United States, visiting heads of state, and other specially designated individuals.
How has Cheatle grappled with these challenges?
She was a career agent before she became director and had served on Joe Biden's protective detail when he was vice president. She was well liked by the president and first lady Jill Biden. She ended her Secret Service career as assistant director for protective operations, a prestigious post supervising the agency's protective missions. After three years in the private sector, as Pepsi’s security chief, Cheatle was appointed by Biden to return as Secret Service director. She took up her post on Sept. 17, 2022.
Cheatle came to the Secret Service headquarters with good intentions. The agency has long been regarded in the federal law enforcement community as a glorified boys club. There is a long-standing inside joke inside the Secret Service that when they travel for work, it is "wheels up, rings off." The implication is that married agents get less married when traveling for work.
An incident in 2012 in Cartagena, Colombia, involved agents assigned to protect then-President Barack Obama cavorting with prostitutes and causing a ruckus after refusing to pay the women. In seeking to address this concern, Cheatle may have prioritized diversity statistics over merited cultural changes.
She has fully embraced the Biden administration's diversity, equity, and inclusion agenda. In the agency's 2023-27 strategic plan , Cheatle states at the outset, "Our fiscal year 2023-2027 strategy is focused on achieving excellence through talent, technology, and diversity."
This core "vision" is repeatedly repeated. The Secret Service intends to "champion diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility," adding, "We must embrace diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility (DEIA) across the agency. DEIA must be demonstrated by all employees — leading by example — through 'every action, every day.'"
Cheatle ties equity to the fulfillment of the Secret Service's mission, asserting, "We will focus on mission requirements, merit, retention of talent, and empowering future leaders at all levels. We will do this while advancing equity and transparency in professional development opportunities."
Cheatle's Secret Service is not the only national security-focused federal agency that has made DEI a priority. As the Washington Examiner has reported, the State Department's Diplomatic Security Service has engaged in similar DEI initiatives to the detriment of its mission . Pursuit of these initiatives is widely viewed in the federal law enforcement community as a way for senior leaders to earn favor from the White House, Democrats on Capitol Hill, and prospective future corporate employers.
The exigent question for Congress is whether Cheatle's DEI initiatives have expanded the Secret Service's talent pool or led to the hiring of weak applicants.
Statistics clearly look large for the director. Cheatle established a target of having 30% of recruits be female by 2030, even though there are many more male applicants. The 30% target is high and apparently designed to appeal to Democrats' ideological agenda rather than the Secret Service’s mission. The Secret Service’s physical standards for new female agent trainees may be too low.
These standards are similar to those of other federal law enforcement agencies. Once graduated from the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center, trainee agents at the Secret Service's James T. Rowley training facility must pass an extensive physical and combat training regime. It bears noting that the benefits provided by female agents far outweigh any gender-based limitations. Female agents can cover even the tallest protectee if said protectee ducks and follows an agent's instructions, as all protectees are told when first receiving a security briefing. But are the best agents being recruited regardless of sex, or does DEI lead to the recruitment of substandard agents? To answer this question, Congress will have to dive into the Secret Service's applicant-hiring-promotion records.
Cheatle's tenure as director has featured significant failings. After cocaine was found at the White House last year, the Secret Service closed its investigation claiming it could not practically interrogate all those who might have left the drug at the presidential residence. Also, last year, a drunken man got into national security adviser Jake Sullivan's home undetected. It was not until Sullivan confronted the man and then alerted his Secret Service detail outside that they became aware of the intrusion. The Washington Examiner first reported on an incident this year in which a Secret Service agent on Vice President Kamala Harris's detail had an apparent mental breakdown and attacked two senior agents on the detail.
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Cheatle has been at least somewhat insulated by the Trump family's support for the Secret Service since Saturday. The former president and his son, Eric Trump, have been particularly generous. The former president saluted the quick response of agents rushing to the stage and covering him. In an interview with MSNBC on Tuesday, Eric Trump described the agents "as heroes that day because they could have got killed as well … these are some of the finest people you’ll ever meet." Eric Trump also saluted a female detail agent on Donald Trump’s detail, who has been unfairly criticized for her height and reaction to the shooting. He described her as "one of the greatest human beings you’ll ever meet," adding, "I would do anything for her."
The question for Cheatle and the Secret Service is whether media and congressional scrutiny will now ask difficult questions and uncover uncomfortable answers. And whether those answers might point to leaders making decisions based on ideology or toward mission success.
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