JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – The embattled director of the Secret Service resigned Tuesday under bipartisan pressure following the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump.
Kimberly Cheatle, who had served as Secret Service director since August 2022, faced growing calls to resign and several investigations into how a gunman was able to get so close to the Republican presidential nominee at an outdoor campaign rally in Pennsylvania.
Cheatle announced her departure after a disastrous congressional hearing Monday before lawmakers where she was unable to answer key questions about the agency’s failures such as why the agency didn’t have agents placed on the warehouse roof or whether the Secret Service flew a drone over the rally site.
Brian Boyd has over 30 years of national security experience and has overseen special force teams like Seal Team 6 and the Delta Force. Boyd said what he witnessed in the former president’s security detail was amateur and would likely result in a major restructuring of the entire agency, which is run by the Department of Homeland Security.
"I’m absolutely embarrassed professionally. My Secret Service allies are embarrassed. It was a top-down failure. It’s an operational failure. We need to see the operations plan to see where the holes were and why there was no coverage on that building,” Boyd said.
Boyd said a professional assassin bullet would not have missed Trump.
“There was no rehearing of the incident. They had not prepared for the narrow stairway. They had to jump off the stage. You don’t put short agents, female or male, in this detail. You don’t put short people in front of a 6 foot 4 inch, 243-pound man and try to carry him off the stage so that’s not a good logistical thing,” Boyd said.
The Secret Service announced Deputy Director Ronald Rowe as the new acting director following Cheatles’ resignation.
“It’s going to take a lot to fix this,” Boys said. “It’s more than just a security failure at an event; it has to do with a lot of changes that need to take place in this agency.”
Cheatle is not the first Secret Service director to step down after the attempted assassination of a politician. Former Director Stuart Knight, who led the agency for eight years, retired just months after then-President Ronald Reagan was shot and injured while walking down the sidewalk to his limousine in Washington on March 30, 1981.