The fallout over last Saturday’s failed assassination attempt against former President Donald Trump is rightly continuing.
Trump, the 2024 presidential front-runner, was nearly killed. And whether a police officer or a Secret Service agent was assigned the task, someone should have been guarding the building from upon which Thomas Matthew Crooks launched his attack. Indeed, Secret Service personnel inside that building noticed Crooks behaving strangely before he climbed onto the roof. At a minimum, the Secret Service command post should have conducted a so-called “post check” to ensure that Crooks was not a threat.
Facing pressure to resign, Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle hasn’t exactly helped her cause. Cheatle claimed the reason an officer was not stationed on top of the building was because it had a sloped roof. As she put it in an interview with ABC News, “That building in particular has a sloped roof at its highest point. And so, you know, there’s a safety factor that would be considered there that we wouldn’t want to put somebody up on a sloped roof.”
Cheatle added that a decision was made to secure the building from the inside.
This argument bears little credibility for two reasons. First, even if the building was secured from the inside, access to its roof was plainly not secured. That is an unquestionable security failure: Secret Service protocol is to deny prospective assassins lines of sight to a target as far as is possible and practical. Second, other Secret Service officers, such as the countersniper team that took down Crooks, were positioned on a separate sloped roof.
The House of Representatives Oversight Committee has subpoenaed Cheatle to appear before it next Tuesday. We should expect Cheatle to face questions both about the assassination attempt and Cheatle’s prioritization of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives. Critics say the director has advanced these initiatives at the expense of the Secret Service’s mission.
There’s no question the Secret Service is struggling. Agents are exhausted by frequent, short-notice travel requirements and extensive overtime work. But as with her predecessors, Cheatle is broadly perceived to have adopted a “can do” attitude in the face of these challenges, pressing personnel to deliver with existing resources rather than pushing the alarm bell on the Secret Service’s resource-mission mismatch.
The mission requirements are certainly vast. The Secret Service now protects dozens of domestic officials, some of whom do not face sufficient security threats to require 24/7 protective details. The Secret Service is also responsible for protecting foreign diplomatic posts and personnel in the United States, all visiting heads of state, and other specially designated individuals.
How has Cheatle grappled with these challenges?
Formerly a career agent, Cheatle previously served on President Joe Biden’s vice presidential protective detail and was well-liked by the president and first lady Jill Biden. Cheatle concluded her Secret Service career as the assistant director for Protective Operations, a highly prestigious post supervising the agency’s various protective missions. After a three year stint as PepsiCo’s security chief, Cheatle was appointed by Joe Biden to return as Secret Service director. She took up her present office on Sept. 17, 2022.
Cheatle came to the Secret Service headquarters with good intentions. The agency has long been regarded in the federal law enforcement community as a glorified boys club. For example, a long-standing inside joke in the Secret Service centers on the refrain, “Wheels up, rings off.” The implication being that married agents become slightly less married when traveling for work. This concern was best underlined by a 2012 incident in Cartagena, Colombia, in which agents assigned to protect former President Barack Obama cavorted with prostitutes and caused a ruckus after refusing to pay their companions. But in seeking to address this concern, it appears Cheatle may have prioritized diversity statistics over merited cultural changes.
Cheatle has fully embraced the Biden administration’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion agenda. In the agency’s 2023-2027 strategic plan, Cheatle opens by stating, “Our fiscal 2023-2027 strategy is focused on achieving excellence through talent, technology, and diversity.”
The strategy reemphasizes this core “vision” repeatedly, later affirming that the Secret Service intends to “champion diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility” and asserts that “We must embrace diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility across the agency. DEIA must be demonstrated by all employees, leading by example, through ‘every action, every day.'”
Cheatle directly ties equity to the fulfillment of the Secret Service’s mission, saying, “We will focus on mission requirements, merit, retention of talent, and empowering future leaders at all levels. We will do this while advancing equity and transparency in professional development opportunities.”
Cheatle is not the only national security-focused federal agent that has made DEI a priority. As the Washington Examiner has reported, the State Department’s Diplomatic Security Service has engaged in similar DEI initiatives to the detriment of its mission. The pursuit of these initiatives is widely viewed in the federal law enforcement community as a way for senior leaders to earn favor from the White House, Democrats on Capitol Hill, and prospective future corporate employers.
The exigent question for Congress is whether Cheatle’s DEI initiatives have expanded the Secret Service’s talent pool or led to the hiring of weak applicants.
Statistics matter to the director. Cheatle has established a target of having 30% of recruits be female by 2030. But considering there are many more male applicants to join the Secret Service than female applicants, this 30% target is high. It appears to be designed to appeal to the Democratic equity agenda rather than the Secret Service’s mission. Questions are also being raised as to whether the Secret Service’s physical entry standards for female agent trainees are too low.
To be fair, these physical standards are similar to those of other federal law enforcement agencies. And once graduated from the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center, trainee agents at the Secret Service’s James T. Rowley training facility must pass an extensive physical and combat training regime. It also bears noting that the benefits provided by female agents far outweigh any sex-based limitations. The operative question is whether the best agents of either sex are being recruited or whether the most DEI-complementary agents are being recruited. To begin to answer this question, Congress will have to dive into the Secret Service’s applicant-hiring-promotion records.
Regardless, Cheatle’s tenure as director has not been without significant failings. After cocaine was found at the White House last year, the Secret Service closed its investigation claiming it could not practically interrogate all those who might have been responsible for leaving the substance at the presidential residence. Also, last year, an intoxicated man gained undetected access to national security adviser Jake Sullivan’s residence. It was not until Sullivan confronted the man and alerted his Secret Service detail outside that they became aware of the intrusion. The Washington Examiner was also first to report on an incident earlier this year in which a Secret Service agent on Vice President Kamala Harris’s detail suffered an apparent mental break and attacked two senior agents on the detail.
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Thus far, Cheatle’s position has been at least somewhat insulated by the Trump family’s support for the Secret Service since Saturday. The former president and his son, Eric Trump, have been particularly generous. The former president saluted the quick response of his detail agents in rushing to the stage and covering him. And in an interview with MSNBC on Tuesday, Eric Trump described the agents “as heroes that day because they could have got killed as well … these are some of the finest people you’ll ever meet.” Eric Trump also saluted the female detail agent on Donald Trump’s detail, who has been unfairly criticized for her height and reaction to the shooting. He described her as “one of the greatest human beings you’ll ever meet,” adding, “I would do anything for her.”
The question for Cheatle and the Secret Service is whether rapacious media and Congressional scrutiny will now ask difficult questions and uncover uncomfortable answers. And whether those answers might point to leaders making decisions based on ideology or toward mission success.