Former Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle has been given her own security detail following several threats, the Washington Examiner reported. Cheatle stepped down in disgrace last month after she failed to stop an assassination attempt against President Donald Trump.
Trump was struck by a bullet at a Butler, Pennsylvania, rally on July 13. Although the former president did not sustain life-threatening injuries, one of the rallygoers, a former fire chief, lost his life.
In addition, two others were seriously wounded by the would-be assassin's bullets. This rightly left many people pointing fingers at Cheatle for such a glaring failure to protect the GOP candidate, with some of that criticism also coming in the form of threats on her life.
The agency has assigned Cheatle protection from the Dignitary Protection Division, which is typically reserved for visiting foreign leaders. This marks the first time such a provision has been made by the agency for one of its own.
There is no justification for threatening Cheatle or anyone else over what happened to Trump. However, it is still appropriate to recognize the many failures she had a hand in that led to Trump almost losing his life.
"The Secret Service’s solemn mission is to protect our nation’s leaders. On July 13th, we failed," Cheatle admitted to the House Oversight and Accountability Committee days after the shooting, according to the Associated Press.
The agency failed to act when it was alerted to a suspicious person, who turned out to be shooter Thomas Matthew Crooks, as many as five separate times. Crooks was also spotted at the event using a rangefinder device used by marksmen to line up shots.
The Secret Service had identified the roof where Crooks would ultimately fire off several rounds before being taken out by law enforcement snipers as an area requiring personnel. It was apparently left wide open on the day of the rally anyway.
Moreover, local law enforcement had also voiced concerns about Crooks and took photos of him as a possible threat before the rally began. However, nothing was done about him until he began shooting at Trump.
Cheatle had been reluctant to resign, but CNN reported that she finally stepped down at the end of July. "In light of recent events, it is with a heavy heart that I have made the difficult decision to step down as your Director," she wrote.
It's become abundantly clear that Cheatle was only a symptom of a larger problem with incompetence within the agency. As Fox News recently revealed, an agent allegedly abandoned her post to breastfeed her baby at a rally for Trump in North Carolina.
RealClearPolitics correspondent Susan Crabtree posted about the event in an exclusive to X, formerly Twitter, on Thursday. Crabtree wrote that "a woman Secret Service special agent abandoned her post to breastfeed with no permission/warning to the event site agent..."
🚨🚨EXCLUSIVE and BREAKING: During a Donald Trump visit to North Carolina yesterday, a woman Secret Service special agent abandoned her post to breastfeed with no permission/warning to the event site agent, according to three sources in the Secret Service community.
Shortly… pic.twitter.com/lkfhhLcA0B
— Susan Crabtree (@susancrabtree) August 15, 2024
There's no excuse for people to threaten officials like Cheatle, regardless of her role in the attempted assassination. Ironically, she'll likely receive better protection than she provided for the former president she was charged with guarding.
