House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) said on Thursday that President Joe Biden should fire Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle a...
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) said on Thursday that President Joe Biden should fire Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle after the security failure underlying the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump at a weekend rally in Pennsylvania.
In a call for all House members on Wednesday, FBI Director Christopher Wray and Cheatle “did not give us satisfactory answers to some very important questions. And some of it needs to be in a classified setting, I suppose,” Johnson said during an interview on Fox Business.
“But I’m prepared this morning to call on President Biden to fire Director Cheatle,” he continued. “Yesterday I said that she should resign. It’s clear that she has no intention to do so, but the oversight here, the mistakes, the ineptitude, whatever it is, was inexcusable.”
Questions have been raised about how a shooter, identified as a 20-year-old Pennsylvania man named Thomas Matthew Crooks, managed to get onto a nearby rooftop and begin shooting at Trump with an AR-style riflebefore the Secret Service could stop him.
Trump survived, but a bullet ripped through his right ear. The shooter also killed one rallygoer and injured two others. A Secret Service counter-sniper reportedly shot and killed the gunman from another building while other personnel rushed to protect Trump and escort him off the stage.
“We almost lost the life of a former president,” Johnson said in his conversation with Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo in Milwaukee, where the Replication National Convention is taking place. “And I think there has to be accountability and it begins at the top. This is ridiculous.”
Republican lawmakers, including Sens. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) and John Barrasso (R-WY), confronted the Secret Service director at the convention on Wednesday evening over what they said were a lack of answers concerning the assassination attempt.
Video shared by Blackburn showed Cheatle walking away from the clash and the Secret Service later released a statement that said, “Continuity of operations is paramount during a critical incident and U.S. Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle has no intentions to step down.”
The statement added, “She deeply respects members of Congress and is fiercely committed to transparency in leading the Secret Service through the internal investigation and strengthening the agency through lessons learned in these internal and external reviews.”
Cheatle is expected to appear at a public hearing next Monday after House Oversight Chairman James Comer (R-KY) subpoenaed the director, the panel said on Wednesday. And the House Homeland Committee is planning its own hearing with Pennsylvania state and local police.
Johnson said he spoke with Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas “within hours” of the shooting “because the buck stops at his desk.” The speaker said Mayorkas “did not have a lot of information, some very important facts that he should have had in front of him.”
With the task force he vowed to establish, Johnson said lawmakers would get “answers” from “everybody involved.” He said there are “so many more questions than there are answers right now, and it’s very frustrating to us. And it is dangerous. … We have got to get accountability.”
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