WASHINGTON—Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle has resigned amid bipartisan outrage over her agency’s failure to stop a 20-year-old gunman from opening fire on former President Donald Trump during a campaign rally, according to people familiar with her decision.
Cheatle’s departure came after a blistering congressional hearing in which she offered minimal new information about the July 13 assassination attempt in western Pennsylvania, which Cheatle acknowledged marked the Secret Service’s most stunning failure since President Ronald Reagan was shot in 1981.
Cheatle vowed to get to the bottom of what she acknowledged was a colossal security lapse, but lawmakers across the aisle said her assurances didn’t inspire confidence and urged her to step down.
Cheatle’s hearing performance “was awful. It was all secret and no service,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin (D., Md.), the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee who had joined Republicans in calling for her resignation. “She answered none of the questions that the American people have.”
The committee’s chairman, Rep. James Comer (R., Ky.), said “there will be more accountability to come.”
“The Secret Service has a no-fail mission yet it failed historically on Director Cheatle’s watch,” he said.
A number of investigations are under way into how Thomas Matthew Crooks fired at least six rounds from the roof of the American Glass Research building roughly 400 feet away from where Trump spoke, killing one spectator, critically injuring two others and leaving Trump with a graze wound to the ear. A Secret Service sniper team shot back, killing Crooks, whose motive remains a mystery .
On Tuesday, top House leaders from both parties said they were setting up a bipartisan task force to probe the attempted assassination. The panel, made up of seven Republicans and six Democrats, will have the power to issue subpoenas, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R., La.) and Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D., N.Y.) said.
Cheatle in her testimony acknowledged that Crooks had been identified as suspicious more than an hour before the shooting. Pressed by lawmakers, she acknowledged that Secret Service agents had received several notifications of a person acting suspiciously.
The director declined to elaborate on those communications. She also declined to say how Crooks got on the roof, or whether authorities sought to approach him after he was initially identified as suspicious. In one revealing exchange, Cheatle suggested that the security team with Trump before he went on stage didn’t know that the former president was facing an active threat.
Her resignation marks an abrupt and unhappy end to a Secret Service career three decades in the making.
Cheatle, 53 years old, applied for the service right out of college and rose through the ranks in a series of roles. She served on the team of agents that secured Vice President Dick Cheney on Sept. 11, 2001. Cheatle later worked on Joe Biden ’s detail during his vice presidency and was assigned to his wife, Jill Biden .
She left the agency in 2021 for a private-sector stint at PepsiCo , but returned when President Biden named her director in 2022. “She has my complete trust,” Biden said at the time.
A day before Cheatle’s testimony, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas named a panel of law-enforcement experts to conduct an independent, 45-day review of the attempted assassination. The Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Homeland Security’s internal watchdog are also examining the shooting.
Write to Sadie Gurman at sadie.gurman@wsj.com and C. Ryan Barber at ryan.barber@wsj.com
