Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle admits the fact a gunman was able to fire shots at Donald Trump in an assassination attempt Saturday was “unacceptable” — but former FBI and Secret Service officials say her refusal to resign since is what has become truly unacceptable.
The heat is increasing on Cheatle as four senators confronted her Wednesday evening at the Republican National Convention, demanding she “resign tonight or start answering our questions.”
GOP Sens. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, John Barrasso of Wyoming, James Lankford of Oklahoma and Kevin Cramer of North Dakota chased Cheatle through the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee but said they did not get satisfactory responses to their queries about the threat to Trump and the Secret service allowing him to go on stage at the Saturday rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, despite knowing of the threat.
It has emerged gunman Thomas Mathew Crooks, 20, scouted the site days earlier and had been flagged as suspicious by the Secret Service almost an hour before the assassination attempt.
“If the review of this whole thing comes back soon and says what I think it’s going to say, she should be removed immediately,” former FBI Assistant Director Chris Swecker told The Post.
Crooks killed one man, severely injured two others and grazed Trump, slicing through his right ear, with an AR-15-style semi-automatic rifle from his perch above an unguarded rooftop, just 130 yards from where Trump was speaking.
He was killed by snipers — but only after he managed to get off eight shots.
It has since emerged he had been spotted by those tasked with securing the area at least an hour earlier and in the moments before he opened fire bystanders warned the local police of in the impending threat. One officer even confronted him on the roof, but backed off.
Still, the message didn’t get through to those guarding Trump and prompt them to get him off stage.
Cheatle made a starting revelation Tuesday, saying the agency decided not to guard the roof from which Crooks opened fire on former President Donald Trump, because it was ‘too slanted’.
“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,” she told ABC News. “And so, you know, the decision was made to secure the building from inside.”
From the roof, Crooks had a clear line of sight to the GOP nominee with his rifle.
A former top FBI official who spoke on condition of anonymity, said Cheatle’s excuse that agents didn’t go up on the rooftop because it was “sloped” was “utter BS.”
“I’ve got a peaked roof and my grandchildren go up on it,” he told The Post.
“The fact is [Cheatle] is incompetent. And it’s tough to watch. I considered the Secret Service were the best trained agents in the country when I was at the FBI. But the way they looked on Saturday — totally clueless — I wonder if they’re getting the training they should be getting, or if that money is going to into something else Cheatle thinks is more important, like diversity.”
Trump supporters told a TV news crew outside the event they’d seen a suspicious person “bear crawling” up the roof of a nearby building ahead of the shooting and tried to alert police officers.
“This was not a ninja, this was a 20-year-old kid dragging a rifle, a rangefinder and a ladder,” Swecker added.
“He was a rank amateur and he just climbed up that wall like Forrest Gump. Everything just aligned for him — but you have to ask yourself why? Nothing about it makes any sense.”
The FBI, who are now handling the investigation into the assassination attempt, have yet to uncover a motive despite searching Crooks’ phone and computer.
Only a single line he posted to online has emerged: “July 13 will be my premiere, watch as it unfolds.”
It also came out Tuesday that US authorities were warned about a potential assassination plot against former Trump by Iran weeks before the deadly shooting at the rally — underscoring concerns about the level of protection the presidential candidate was given, according to a report.
“To omit having someone stationed on the rooftop where this guy took his shots is unconscionable. Here was a possibility for a real threat and they seem to have ignored it. There’s obviously a lot that went wrong. They absolutely blew it,” said Peter Lake, a former consultant for the FBI and Department of Justice who worked as a domestic terrorist infiltrator.
Cheatle was in the crosshairs immediately after the Saturday shooting, saying she has been too focused on woke policies, such as making sure the department is 30 percent women by 2030, to take care of the agency’s more crucial business.
They note she even allowed a YouTube influencer to train with agents last year.
Critics also pointed out three female Secret Service agents in Trump’s immediate protection detail were women, one of whom was much shorter than the 6’3″ foot, roughly 250-lb Trump and several of whom seem to be flustered when trying to get at their holsters. They said taller, heavier males are better suited to guard world leaders and presidential nominees.
The New York Times called it a “sexist theory” in a story which ran Tuesday.
Notably, Trump’s Secret Service detail during the first night of the Republican National Convention underway in Milwaukee featured only male agents — all of whom were noticeably closer in size to Trump’s frame.
Cheatle, 53, served 28 years in the Secret Service and was part of its protective detail guarding then-Vice President Dick Cheney before she left to become head of global security at PepsiCo.
She returned to the agency when President Biden appointed her to its top post in 2022.
“There’s no way to slice this any other way than a failure,” Michael Harrigan, former chief of the FBI’s Firearm Training unit who’s now with Pax Group LLC.
“The rooftop should have been covered. The roof was the fail point. They left an elevated platform unsecured within reasonable rifle shot of the president.”
He added that the investigation into the incident will be thorough — and likely embarrassing for the Secret Service.
“It’s going to be a lot of who knew what when and why the op people didn’t consider that rooftop. They are going to get every cellphone photo and video. We don’t want another JFK [being shot from the] grassy knoll.”