Secret Service resignation increases demand for answers in Trump assassination attempt

The abrupt resignation of Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle a day after her disastrous appearance before a U.S. House committee has only increased calls for deep-dive investigations into the attempted assassination of former President Donald J. Trump.

Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, predicted that “there will be more accountability to come” through a “full accounting of how these security failures happened.”

“Egregious security failures leading up to and at the Butler, Pennsylvania, campaign rally resulted in the assassination attempt of President Trump, the murder of an innocent victim, and harm to others in the crowd,” Comer said.

Pennsylvania State Police Commissioner Christopher Paris added one big detail to the mystery on July 23 when he said would-be assassin Thomas Matthew Crooks got off eight shots before he was killed by a counter-sniper.

“Eight casings have been recovered," Paris told lawmakers during a hearing of the House Committee on Homeland Security.

Rep. Eli Crane (R-Ariz.), a former Navy SEAL and sniper, asked Paris whether Pennsylvania State Police teams conducted investigations at the Crooks home in Bethel Park.

“I believe we had people that participated in that, securing of it,” Paris said. “There were bomb assets that we provided.”

Crane also asked whether state police noticed “anything fishy” at the home, such as no silverware or trash present, or extreme cleanliness “almost like a medical lab?”

“I wasn’t given any of those details,” Paris said.

Cheatle’s four-hour appearance before Comer’s committee the day before shed almost no light on how Crooks came so close to executing a former president and a leading candidate in the 2024 presidential election. It highlighted in stark relief the volumes of information that Cheatle said she didn’t know about the July 13 tragedy — and also what she apparently did know but would not share with Congress.

'There are some of us up here that don't have a lot of confidence in the FBI.'

“The failed attempt on President Trump’s life demands urgent and comprehensive congressional oversight,” said U.S. Rep. Mark Green (R-Tenn.), chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security. “We must understand how it happened — and ensure changes are made — so this never happens again.”

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said he would introduce a bipartisan bill with Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.) to require Senate confirmation of candidates for director of the U.S. Secret Service.

“The Secret Service’s core mission is to protect the individuals entrusted to its care,” Grassley said in a statement.

“President Trump’s brush with death was a Secret Service failure of epic proportions, and this mission failure must never be repeated,” Grassley said. “Our bill is a crucial step toward providing the transparency and accountability that Congress and the American people deserve from the Secret Service.”

Dan Bongino, a former Secret Service agent turned radio and podcast host, said investigators will quickly discover the number of times the Trump campaign requested more protection from the Secret Service, only to have the requests denied.

“Folks, this thing is about to get so much worse," Bongino said on his July 23 podcast. "I’m telling you there is an email trail and white papers out there. A long email trail documenting multiple security enhancement requests for the DTD — Donald Trump protective detail — that were rebuffed and denied. Kim Cheatle is never, ever going to be able to hide from that."

Appearing on "The Glenn Beck Program," Bongino said he was called a conspiracy theorist for the past year for warning that an attempt would be made on Trump's life.

“All I'm telling you is the failure here was so apocalyptic, everyone on that advance team should have resigned the next day," Bongino said. "The director, the deputy director, all of them. How they still have jobs is incredible.”

'What are you covering up?'

Ten days out from the assassination attempt that took the life of a retired firefighter and seriously wounded two others, the picture of what happened at the Butler Farm Show Inc. fairground is not filling out nearly fast enough for lawmakers.

Cheatle was asked repeatedly how many rifle shell casings were recovered from the roof of Building 6 at the American Glass Research complex from which Crooks staged his attack on Trump and the rally crowd. She deferred time and again to the FBI, which is handling the criminal investigation, but then let on she knew more than she was telling.

“Did they share with you how many shell casings were on the roof?” asked Rep. Lisa McClain (R-Mich.). When Cheatle began to answer, McClain cut her off and repeated the question.

“Yes,” Cheatle replied.

“So they’ve shared the information with you,” McClain said. “You just don’t want to share the information with us, correct?”

McClain then tried repeatedly to get Cheatle to reveal how many shell casings were recovered, but Cheatle didn’t budge.

“If you’re supposed to be in charge, if the buck stops with you, how come you can’t share the answers?” McClain asked. “What are you covering up?”

U.S. Secret Service agents swarm former President Donald J. Trump after he was shot by a would-be assassin at the Butler Farm Show fairgrounds in Butler, Pa., on July 13.(Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

Under questioning by Rep. Russell Fry (R-S.C.), Cheatle said the Secret Service radio communications from the Trump rally were not recorded or preserved. “We do not have radio communications from that day,” she said.

A shooting timeline assembled by U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) showed that delays occurred between intelligence being gathered by local police and it being sent to and received by the Secret Service.

Photographs of Crooks taken by a local police counter-sniper at 5:14 p.m. — nearly an hour before the shooting — were not transmitted to the command center until 5:49 p.m. The command center, which included Secret Service personnel, didn’t acknowledge receipt of local police messages that they were seeking a suspicious person until 5:55 p.m. Crooks opened fire on Trump and the crowd just after 6:11 p.m.

Secret Service communications problems have been a recurring theme in the agency’s recent history, according to sources on Capitol Hill. A forthcoming report from the Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General is expected to identify Secret Service communication failures on Jan. 6, 2021, a senior congressional aide told Blaze News.

'Joint terrorism task forces are almost exclusively focusing on anonymous tips about a "right-wing" response to the failed assassination attempt.'

Inspector General Joseph Cuffari learned in December 2021 that the Secret Service had erased phone text messages received and sent by its agents on Jan. 5 and 6, 2021, during a system migration. Cuffari was heavily criticized by House Democrats for failing to notify oversight committees in a timely manner.

Serious questions have been raised about the behavior of Secret Service agents at the scene of a pipe bomb found next to the Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington, D.C., the afternoon of Jan. 6. After a Capitol Police officer discovered a bomb near a park bench just outside the DNC building, security video showed agents sitting in vehicles in the driveway finishing their lunches before exiting the SUVs to investigate.

About 90 minutes before that, a Secret Service protective detail brought Vice President-elect Kamala Harris to the DNC and drove into a garage just feet from the pipe bomb. The lack of urgency on the part of Secret Service agents and local police after the bomb discovery is being investigated by U.S. Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.).

Another key question that Cheatle did not answer at the July 22 hearing was whether her agency or the FBI had tracked Crooks’ whereabouts in the days and months leading up to the shooting.

“We need to have confidence that if the FBI is leading this investigation, that they're leading a credible investigation, because there are some of us up here that don't have a lot of confidence in the FBI,” Comer said.

Worry about the FBI probe of the Trump shooting prompted the Oversight Project at the Heritage Foundation to launch its own assassination investigation. Some of the early results released July 22 showed that a cell phone that had visited Crooks’ home and work addresses also pinged from a Washington, D.C., mall and office building that includes offices of the FBI.

The Oversight Project, using commercially available geo-location data, also found that a phone likely belonging to Crooks himself visited Butler, Pennsylvania, twice in the 10 days leading up to the Trump shooting.

'The Biden/Harris administration did not properly protect me, and I was forced to take a bullet for Democracy.'

Oversight’s report said a phone traveled from Crooks’ home address in Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, to Butler, including a stop in the parking lot of a Home Depot store.

The report issued by Sen. Johnson said Crooks visited a Home Depot in Butler the morning of the shooting, purchasing a 5.5-foot double aluminum ladder.

The FBI seems more interested in pinning the political violence on domestic extremists than solving the criminal investigation of Crooks, according to former FBI Special Agent Steve Friend, a whistleblower who left the Bureau in February 2023 after being suspended for raising concerns about FBI tactics in Jan. 6 cases.

“More of my @FBI moles are confirming. Their joint terrorism task forces are almost exclusively focusing on anonymous tips about a ‘right-wing’ response to the failed assassination attempt," Friend wrote on X. “There needs to be a parallel independent investigation.”

The Oversight Project agreed, asking for the public's help with its investigation of the assassination attempt. Tips can be sent via email to tips.oversightproject@heritage.org.

“This is part of the reason why we are conducting an independent investigation,” the Oversight Project posted on X. “The system cannot investigate itself.”

The FBI has not issued an update on its investigation in the past nine days.

Trump took to social media with some new comments on the shooting.

“The Biden/Harris Administration did not properly protect me, and I was forced to take a bullet for Democracy,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “It was my great honor to do so!”

Trump's former presidential physician, Ronny Jackson, expressed frustration with people minimizing the severity of Trump’s bullet wound.

“People forget how serious this was. He was less than 2 centimeters away from having a bullet traveling at 3,300 feet per second enter the back of his head,” Jackson told Fox News.

“It irks me to no end how people are trying to minimize what happened,” said Jackson, who has examined Trump and reported the former president is “recovering well and is in good spirits."

"By the grace of God, he was spared.”

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