Former Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle spoke out against accusations that she lied to Congress and denied requests for additional security from the Trump campaign before the assassination attempt on President Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, last year.
A report from the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs found that the Secret Service “denied or left unfulfilled at least 10 requests” from Trump’s security detail for “additional resources” ahead of the July 13, 2024, shooting. Cheatle rejected some of the report’s findings on Sunday.
“While I agree mistakes were made and reform is needed, many of which I was actually in the midst of implementing at the time of my resignation, that fateful day was literally a perfect storm of events,” Cheatle wrote.
The report had accused Cheatle of falsely testifying to Congress that no Secret Service “asset requests were denied for the Butler rally.” Cheatle resigned as director shortly after her testimony.
“The Director of Secret Service is not typically directly engaged in the approval or denial of requests for support; the agency has procedures in place to identify such requirements and requests for additional assets,” she wrote, adding that “for the Butler rally, I actually did direct additional assets to be provided, particularly in the form of agency counter snipers.”
Cheatle wrote that “any assertion or implication that I provided misleading testimony is patently false and does a disservice to those men and women on the front lines who have been unfairly disciplined for a team, rather than individual, failure.”
Six agents were suspended by the Secret Service for failures connected to the assassination attempt.
Other senators on the committee also referred to the day as a “perfect storm.”
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“What happened here was really an accumulation of errors that produced a perfect storm of stunning failure,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) said last year. “A lot of these individual failings, if corrected at the time, might have prevented this tragedy.”
On July 13, 2024, a 20-year-old gunman, Thomas Crooks, opened fire on Trump from the rooftop of a nearby building during a campaign rally. A bullet grazed Trump’s ear and one person was killed, with two others critically injured. Crooks was killed on the scene by a Secret Service sniper.
