Washington. US Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle resigned from her post on Tuesday over the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump at a rally. Cheatle gave this information in an email to department colleagues. Cheatle said in her email on Tuesday, “I take full responsibility for the security lapse. In view of recent events, with a heavy heart I have taken the difficult decision to resign from the post of director.”
Ever since the attack on Trump, the intelligence service has been accused of serious lapses. There was pressure from all quarters on Cheatle, who has been the director since August 2022, to resign. Just a day earlier, Cheatle had admitted before lawmakers that the attempted assassination of former President Trump was the ‘most serious’ security lapse since the shooting of then-President Ronald Reagan in 1981.
Cheatle admitted this during his appearance before the House Oversight and Accountability Committee regarding the attempt to assassinate Trump, in which various members of Parliament, including two Indian American lawmakers Raja Krishnamurthy and Ro Khanna, questioned him. Cheatle said that his agency failed in its mission to protect former President Donald Trump.
Cheatle called the attack on Trump the Secret Service’s ‘biggest security failure’ in decades. Cheatle admitted that before the shooting on Trump, the agency was informed two to five times about the presence of a suspicious person at the former president’s rally. She said that she takes ‘full responsibility’ for the security failure at the Pennsylvania rally. Cheatle said, ‘The mission of the Secret Service is to protect our country’s leaders. We failed on July 13.’ Cheatle said that the roof from which the attacker fired was marked as a sensitive place a few days before Trump’s rally.
It is noteworthy that during an election rally in Pennsylvania on July 13, a gunman fired several bullets at former President Trump (78). In this attack, a bullet grazed Trump’s right ear, while one person attending the rally was killed and two others were seriously injured. A member of the intelligence service killed the attacker on the spot.
Tags: Donald Trump, Joe Biden
FIRST PUBLISHED : July 23, 2024, 20:09 IST
