The homeland security secretary, Alejandro N. Mayorkas, on Sunday announced the members of a panel to conduct an independent review into security failures after a gunman was able to wound former President Donald J. Trump last weekend at a campaign rally in Butler, Pa.
The Secret Service, which answers to Mr. Mayorkas, is facing criticism for its decisions in planning security for the event, and Republican leaders have called for the agency’s director, Kimberly A. Cheatle, to resign. Mr. Mayorkas’s announcement on Sunday promised that the panel would get to the bottom of what went wrong and what changes the Secret Service should make to protect the country’s leaders.
“This independent review will examine what happened and provide actionable recommendations to ensure they carry out their no-fail mission most effectively and to prevent something like this from ever happening again,” Mr. Mayorkas said in a statement.
The panel — described by Mr. Mayorkas as bipartisan — that will be conducting the 45-day review will be made up of Janet Napolitano, a former homeland security secretary; Frances Townsend, a former homeland security adviser to President George W. Bush; Mark Filip, a former federal judge and a deputy attorney general under Mr. Bush; and David Mitchell, a former secretary of the Delaware Department of Public Safety and Homeland Security. Mr. Mayorkas said he could invite additional experts to join the panel in the coming days.
Ms. Cheatle said in a statement on Sunday that she was eager to cooperate with the review.
The announcement comes as Mr. Mayorkas is under scrutiny for his handling of the events surrounding the assassination attempt, especially whether he has been able to get adequate answers from Ms. Cheatle. Her tenure grew more tenuous over the weekend after the Secret Service revised public comments that it had not denied requests for additional security for Mr. Trump the past two years.
Ms. Cheatle is expected to testify on Monday before the House Oversight Committee and will face a barrage of questions about the Secret Service’s decisions before, during and immediately after the failed assassination on July 13. It is likely to be a pivotal moment in the search for what happened at the campaign rally and how federal law enforcement was unable to protect the former president.
Republican lawmakers cited concerns about why the warehouse roof from which the gunman shot was not fully secured and why Mr. Trump was kept on the stage despite warnings of a suspicious person at the rally.
On CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday, Representative Mike Turner, Republican of Ohio, said that from the timeline the Secret Service provided to lawmakers, it appeared that agents at the rally were aware of a threat nine minutes before Mr. Trump took the stage but still allowed him to go on.
“As he’s alive, we look at this as incompetence,” Mr. Turner said. “But if he had been killed, they would be culpable.”
The gunman, Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20, of Bethel Park, Pa., injured Mr. Trump with a shot that left his ear bloodied. Three rally attendees were also shot, one fatally. Mr. Crooks was killed by a Secret Service counter-sniper.
Officially, the Department of Homeland Security continues to support Ms. Cheatle. “The secretary has full confidence in Director Cheatle’s ability to lead the U.S. Secret Service,” Naree Ketudat, a department spokeswoman, said on Sunday.
But officials in the department and at the White House have been increasingly frustrated over the Secret Service’s handling of the fallout of the attempted assassination, specifically the agency’s communication strategy, according to an administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the person was not authorized to speak publicly about internal matters.
Officials were also frustrated that the Secret Service did not have someone at a news conference immediately after the shooting. Ms. Cheatle was already in Milwaukee in preparation for the Republican National Convention.
In an interview with ABC News on Tuesday , Ms. Cheatle said that Secret Service agents were not deployed on the roof of the warehouse the gunman used because of the steepness of the slope.
“I’ve got my own security detail through Capitol Police,” House Speaker Mike Johnson said on CNN on Sunday. “Those guys would go on a roof that has a 90-degree angle. I don’t understand what her responses are, initially. They don’t make sense to people, and she has a lot to answer for.”
Ms. Cheatle has said she has no plans to resign.
The Secret Service’s public responses also raise questions about why the agency’s leaders were so adamant early last week that they had not denied requests from the Trump campaign for extra resources.
After the rally, some Republican lawmakers asserted that homeland security and Secret Service leadership had rejected Trump campaign requests for additional security at events over the past two years, a contention that the Secret Service initially denied.
“There’s an untrue assertion that a member of the former president’s team requested additional resources and that those were rebuffed,” Anthony Guglielmi, a spokesman for the Secret Service, said last Sunday, the day after the shooting.
Mr. Mayorkas himself said on Monday that the allegation of denied requests was “a baseless and irresponsible statement and it is one that is unequivocally false.”
But on Saturday, Mr. Guglielmi said that the agency had indeed denied some campaign requests for Secret Service support. He said, however, that the agency regularly uses local and state law enforcement agencies to help support federal protection, and that this was the case at the Butler Farm Show grounds, where the Trump rally was held.
In his CNN interview on Sunday, Mr. Johnson told the host, Jake Tapper, that he had talked with Mr. Mayorkas several hours after the shooting and asked him “basic questions” about the security that was in place at the rally. “Mayorkas at that time did not even know whether drones were used for security,” Mr. Johnson said. “I mean, some very basic things.”
The Federal Aviation Administration said in a statement that the Secret Service had not asked to use drones to provide agents with aerial views of the rally.
A senior homeland security official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the pending investigations, said that the Secret Service has regular conversations with the people it protects over the type of resources the agency can give and contingencies for when it cannot provide additional federal resources.
The official said the department’s current understanding was that the Secret Service had not denied resources to the rally in Butler and that Mr. Mayorkas was trying to explain that in his denial earlier in the week.
The official, who noted that the Secret Service currently protects 36 people, said that Mr. Mayorkas did not go into details with Mr. Johnson about the drone because the speaker had been calling to talk about the actual assassination attempt.
Ms. Cheatle is a longtime veteran of the agency who previously served in the protective detail of Dick Cheney and Joe Biden when they served as vice president. Mr. Biden has spoken glowingly about Ms. Cheatle and, as president, appointed her to the Secret Service’s top role in 2022.
Mr. Trump, while not referring to Ms. Cheatle, lauded the performance of the agents surrounding him at the rally who quickly shuttled him to safety.
“I want to thank The United States Secret Service, and all of Law Enforcement, for their rapid response on the shooting that just took place in Butler, Pennsylvania,” Mr. Trump wrote on social media last weekend.
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