The Secret Service director was clueless to the end
by Jeff Stein
Bipartisanship is rare in Washington, to say the least. But there was unanimity here yesterday as Kimberly Cheatle tried to dodge and weave through sharp questioning from Democrats and Republicans alike about her agency’s big fail in Butler, Pa., and her own dissembling statements in the wake of the near assassination of Donald Trump.
In an oversight hearing yesterday, Republican Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina neatly summed up her colleagues’ reaction to Cheatle’s shape-shifting explanations with, “You’re full of shit today. You’re just being completely dishonest.” Mace’s crude outburst followed a tough grilling by Rep. Jamie Raskin, the Maryland Democrat who’s normally quick to defend Biden administration appointees against Republican attacks. When you lose Raskin, you’re toast.
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| United States Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle testifies before the House Oversight and Accountability Committee during a hearing at the Rayburn House Office Building on July 22, 2024 in Washington, D.C. KENT NISHIMURA/GETTY IMAGES |
Cheatle resigned today, saying in a letter to her staff that she took “full responsibility” for the agency’s egregious security lapses. Of course, from Day One Cheatle constantly claimed she was “accountable” and took “full responsibility” for what happened, although she never did in fact until today—10 days after she should have resigned or been fired for the near catastrophe.
Biden deserves blame for the political debacle that followed. In a classic case of his too little, too late style, he praised Cheatle for her “honor, courage, and incredible integrity to take full responsibility for an organization tasked with one of the most challenging jobs in public service. We all know what happened that day can never happen again,” he added in a statement from Wilmington, De., where he’s recovering from a bout with Covid but not his deflated presidency.
But it will happen again, if chronic problems of understaffing, bad management and poor morale in the Secret Service aren’t fixed fast. Republican attacks on Kamala Harris, from Trump and J.D. Vance down to their shills on Fox News, are already so personal and incendiary that they’re bound to excite some MAGA hothead or a deranged kid like Thomas Crooks to take a shot.
Former DHS chief of intelligence John Cohen warned last week that, thanks to administration bumbling, the security situation was rapidly unravelling at a time of maximum danger.
“This is the most dangerous threat environment that I’ve experienced in the 40-plus years that I’ve been involved in law enforcement and homeland security,” Cohen told SpyTalk Contributing Editor Michael Isikoff on the Spytalk podcast.
“I think they’ve got a lot to explain and they need to get it explained pretty quickly or the situation is going to spiral out of control even more so than it is today,” said Cohen, who served as intelligence chief of the Department of Homeland Security until 2022. “And it’s pretty much out of control” right now.
It’s been that way for some time. As I pointed out back on July 14:
In her magnificent, 500-page deep dive 2021 book, Zero Fail: The Rise and Fall of the Secret Service, three-time Pulitzer winning Washington Post investigative reporter Carol Leonnig cited pratfall after pratfall and concluded that the “elite, hardworking band of patriots” responsible for protecting presidents from JFK’s fate morphed into “a frat boy culture of infighting, indulgence and obsolescence.”
Judging by events over the past 10 days, there’s still something seriously wrong with the Secret Service, starting with a lack of real accountability from the top down.
Cheatle’s gone now, but not forgotten. She and her damaged agency will be on he hot seat in the Republican-controlled House, with Democrats assenting, for weeks, if not months, to come—and rightly so.
Jeff Stein is the editor-in-chief of SpyTalk, a newsletter covering U.S. intelligence, defense and foreign policy, on the Substack platform. Previously, he was the SpyTalk columnist (and national security correspondent) at Newsweek, and before that, the SpyTalk blogger at The Washington Post.
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