What we learned about the Trump assassination attempt from the Secret Service director’s testimony before Congress

The head of the U.S. Secret Service on Monday described the July 13 assassination attempt against Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Butler, Pa., as her agency’s “most significant operational failure” in decades and said she took “full responsibility.”

But agency director Kimberly Cheatle evaded key questions about that day’s events and resisted bipartisan calls for her resignation during a contentious hearing before the House Oversight Committee.

“The Secret Service’s solemn mission is to protect our nation’s leaders. On July 13, we failed,” Cheatle told members of the committee in her opening remarks, her first public appearance since 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks managed to fire off several rounds from the roof of a building less than 150 feet away from the stage where Trump was speaking.

The attack left Trump with minor injuries to his ear, killed one spectator, and left two others in critical condition. In the days since, the Secret Service and local law enforcement have engaged in a messy, public bout of finger-pointing over who was to blame for the security lapses that allowed Crooks to carry out his attack.

Here’s what we learned from Monday’s hearing:

Cheatle told lawmakers she was “proud beyond words” of the agents who protected Trump during the rally and added later that they deserved an “A” grade for their work that day.

But that assessment drew repeated skepticism from committee members, including Rep. Stephen Lynch (D., Mass.) who said he was flummoxed by how they allowed a wounded Trump to remain on the rally stage for over a minute “with a shooter with a high capacity weapon … and [who] could have got off we don’t know how many more rounds.”

Rep. Mike Turner (R., Ohio) piled on.

”Because Donald Trump is alive, and thank God he is, you look incompetent,” he told Cheatle. “If Donald Trump had been killed you would have looked culpable.”

The Secret Service acknowledged over the weekend that it had denied multiple requests from the Trump campaign over the last two years to beef up the former president’s security detail.

But Cheatle maintained Monday that “there were no requests that were denied” for the Butler rally.

That answer came under heavy questioning from both Republicans and Democrats. At one point, Rep. Jim Jordan (R., Ohio) suggested that perhaps the Trump campaign hadn’t bothered to continue pressing for more security resources because of those past denials.

“Maybe they got tired of asking,” he said.

Cheatle told the committee that the agency received multiple reports of a suspicious person in the crowd before Crooks opened fire and that local law enforcement officers first flagged him after seeing him carrying a range finder outside the Butler Fair Grounds venue.

“I don’t have an exact number to share with you today,” she said. “But from what I have been able to discern, somewhere between two and five times there was some sort of communication about a suspicious individual.”

That prompted several committee members to question why the Secret Service had still allowed Trump to take the stage.

Cheatle maintained that range finders — used by marksmen to measures distances to remote objects — were not banned from events protected by the agency and that a person carrying one wouldn’t necessarily prompt Secret Service intervention. She also explained that the Secret Service differentiates between someone flagged as “suspicious” and someone viewed as a potential threat.

“There are a number of times at protective events where suspicious people are identified, and those individuals have to be investigated,” she said.

Cheatle continued: “If the detail had been passed information that there was a threat, the detail would never have brought the former president out onto the stage,” she said.

Cheatle acknowledged that local officers had identified Crooks skulking around outside the venue, called in reports, and even disseminated his photo more than a half hour before he opened fire.

She confirmed media reports that at least two local officers had called in reports of Crooks acting suspiciously, taken his photo and circulated it to others involved with the security effort. They first saw Crooks crawling on the ground near the rally site, setting off a scramble by authorities to locate him, Pittsburgh TV news station WPXI has reported.

Moments later, a half hour before the shooting, a sniper with the Beaver County Emergency Services Unit — which contributed eight members to that day’s security effort — spotted Crooks again, scoping out the roof of the agricultural tool makers’ warehouse roughly 150 feet from the rally stage.

Cheatle said Monday that the Secret Service had identified the building as a potential vulnerability days before Trump’s rally. And again, the officer who spotted Crooks called the report in and sent a photograph.

She told members of the committee she was unaware if any officer had spoken to Crooks during that period.

Much to the frustration of the committee’s members, Cheatle repeatedly evaded key questions about the shooting, citing the ongoing investigation by the FBI and her agency’s internal probe.

Those included queries about how many Secret Service agents were deployed to protect Trump that day, whether there were any agents on the roof where Crooks opened fire, and who specifically had excluded that warehouse building from the agency’s security plan for the rally.

Rep. Michael Cloud (R., Texas) balked at her repeated resistance to answer questions.

“You’re in charge of the investigation of your own failure,” he said. “So how is anybody in American supposed to be able to trust the results … as being transparent and genuine?”

Cheatle said she looked forward to providing a full accounting to members of Congress once the Secret Service’s internal investigation was complete in 60 days. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) and several of her colleagues called that timeline “unacceptable.”

As Monday’s hearing progressed, bipartisan calls for Cheatle’s resignation continued to pile up. But she resisted demands for her resignation, as she has done since the shooting.

“I think I am the best person to lead the Secret Service at this time,” she told committee members.

By the conclusion of the proceedings, the GOP and Democratic leaders of the committees — Reps. James Comer (R., Ky.) and Jamie Raskin (D., Md.) — said they would sign a joint letter demanding she step down. Cheatle maintains the support of President Joe Biden and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.

Several Republican committee members reiterated a theme that has caught fire in right-wing media since the attack on Trump: An effort to use the assassination attempt to delegitimize steps the Secret Service has taken to diversify its work force in recent years.

Some GOP members have questioned whether women, including Cheatle herself, are physically capable of protecting national leaders, drawing swift condemnation from their Democratic counterparts. Rep. Tim Burchett (R., Tenn.) told Cheatle Monday that she was “a DEI horror story.”

But picking up on that strand of questioning, Rep. Scott Perry (R., Pa.) pressed the director on whether short agents were capable of adequately protecting Trump, who is over six feet tall.

“If somebody is seven feet tall, and you’re five feet tall,” he said, “there’s going to be a delta there that is problematic to protecting the protectant.”

Cheatle responded: “The agents that are assigned to our protectees are perfectly capable.”

The contentious hearing is only the start of what is shaping up to be a tough week for law enforcement officials on Capitol Hill.

Members of the House Homeland Security Committee joined Rep. Mike Kelly, a Republican from Butler who attended the July 13 rally, in visiting the Butler Fair Grounds site Monday in advance of hearings it has promised to hold in the coming days.

Meanwhile, the House Judiciary Committee has scheduled a hearing Wednesday with testimony from FBI Director Christopher Wray to demand answers about the bureau’s ongoing investigation into the attack.

House members are also expected to vote this week on a resolution establishing an 11-member bipartisan task force to investigate the assassination. House Speaker Mike Johnson, who attended Monday’s Oversight Committee hearing, said he hoped creating such a task force would help focus the House’s efforts to investigate.