Secrets of the Secret Service

It’s hard to recall a congressional hearing that boiled with such bipartisan frustration as engulfed the House Oversight Committee as it grilled the head of the Secret Service over the failure at Butler Farm. It wasn’t so much the evasiveness and recalcitrance of the witness, Kimberly Cheatle. It was her insistence that she takes “full responsibility” for the failure without taking the logical next step — offering her resignation.When we learned that Ms. Cheatle would be making her first appearance before Congress since the assassination attempt on President Trump, we offered a modest list of seven questions that we hoped the Secret Service head would address in Monday’s hearing. After five hours of testimony, Ms. Cheatle did not provide translatable answers to any of them. She clammed up tighter than a conch in a mudslide.What Ms. Cheatle did deign to share, however, was an acknowledgement that the near-fatal assassination attempt on July 13, which occurred under her watch, marked “the most significant operational failure at the Secret Service in decades.” Most Americans agree with her there. The last time a security failure of this magnitude took place was back in 1981 when President Reagan was shot outside of the Washington Hilton. While there are some similarities between the attacks on Trump and Reagan — both presidents were targeted by a lone shooter and managed to survive — there are more ways in which they are different. One of them being that the director of the Secret Service serving when Reagan was shot resigned afterward, while Ms. Cheatle is forcefully defending her job despite intensifying calls from both parties for her to step down.Though when asked by Congressman Ro Khanna about the fate of her Reagan-era predecessor, Stuart Knight, she mistakenly recalled in front of the Committee that he remained in his post. “He resigned,” Mr. Khanna corrected. “You cannot go leading a security agency when there’s an assassination attempt on a presidential candidate,” the Democratic Congressman said. “I just don’t think this is partisan.”It takes only seconds on the internet to discover the staggering number of theories about what might or what might not have transpired. The committee itself seemed — for the most part — to eschew opening up the various conspiratorial speculations. Instead, members from both sides of the aisle seemed intent on focusing on the leadership failures within the Secret Service, only to be stolidly rebuffed by Ms. Cheatle. The case for Ms. Cheatle’s resignation seems to be something both Democrats and Republicans can agree on, even as the country inches closer to another potentially polarizing election. Soon after the hearing finished, two unlikely allies, the Republican leader of the Oversight panel, Congressman James Comer, and its ranking Democratic member, Representative Jamie Raskin, issued a letter to Ms. Cheatle urging her to resign. “Today you failed to provide answers to basic questions regarding that stunning operational failure,” they wrote in a rare joint statement. In so doing, they told the director, “you failed to reassure the American people that the Secret Service has learned its lessons and begun to correct its systemic blunders and failures.” Should Ms. Cheatle refuse to resign, all eyes will swivel to President Biden to see whether he will say, “You’re fired.”

Secrets of the Secret Service

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