After former President Donald Trump’s assassination attempt on Saturday during a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, people have raised concerns online over the U.S. Secret Services’ failure to prevent the shooting, with some calling for Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle to resign.
Cheatle was sworn in on September 2022 and has over 7,800 employees under her leadership. Before coming to the Secret Service, Cheatle was PepsiCo’s senior director in global security, which “involved developing risk management assessment and risk mitigation strategies,” according to her bio on the Secret Service website. Cheatle is not new to the Secret Service. Before working for Pepsi, she served 27 years in the agency.
Her most recent role at the agency before her stint at PepsiCo was as Assistant Director of the Office of Protective Operations, which involved balancing the budget and researching risk reduction for protected personnel, facilities, and events. Before that, she served as Special Agent in Charge of the Atlanta Field Office, “providing oversight for all mission related investigations, protective intelligence and protective visits in the state of Georgia.”
Cheatle also previously ran the Secret Service training facility, the James J. Rowley Training Center, and before that, she was the Special Agent in Charge at the Office of Strategic Planning and Policy.
Newsweek has reached out to the Secret Service via email on Sunday morning for comment about concerns about the Secret Service’s failure to prevent the shooting.
While speaking at an outdoor rally in Butler on Saturday at around 6 p.m. ET, Trump, the presumptive 2024 GOP presidential nominee, was struck by a bullet that pierced his right ear in what the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is calling an assassination attempt. Video of the shooting showed members of Trump’s Secret Service team using their bodies as human shields around the former president to get him into his car and away from any more danger.
Trump is “fine” according to his spokesperson. The 20-year-old shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, who fired rounds off the roof of a nearby building, was killed by a Secret Service counter-sniper. One rally attendee was killed in the shooting and two more are in critical condition, according to the Secret Service.
Following the shooting, people began to ask questions about how Crooks was able to pull the trigger, concerned that such an attack could happen in the presence of the Secret Service and other security.
“How was a sniper with a full rifle kit allowed to bear crawl onto the closest roof to a presidential nominee,” conservative activist Jack Posobiec asked on X, formerly Twitter, on Saturday night.
How was a sniper with a full rifle kit allowed to bear crawl onto the closest roof to a presidential nominee
— Jack Poso 🇺🇸 (@JackPosobiec) July 14, 2024
At a late-night news conference on Saturday, which the Secret Service did not attend, Pennsylvania State Police Lieutenant Colonel George Bivens said,