The director of the Secret Service, Kimberly A. Cheatle, resigned on Tuesday, after security failures surrounding the attempted assassination of former President Donald J. Trump and calls for her to step down from prominent Republican lawmakers.
The resignation is a rapid fall for the agency veteran who protected Dick Cheney and Joseph R. Biden Jr. in their vice-presidential tenures and was publicly supported by Biden administration officials after a gunman shot at Mr. Trump at a rally on July 13. The glaring security mistakes before the shooting, however, and the heated criticism that Ms. Cheatle faced in the days since had left her position increasingly in doubt.
Mr. Biden gave high praise to Ms. Cheatle in an announcement of her appointment to the position in August 2022. Mr. Biden said in a statement then that his family “came to trust her judgment and counsel” and that she had the president’s “complete trust.” She worked for the agency for nearly three decades.
But her fortunes changed when Mr. Trump was injured in the shooting at a campaign rally in Butler, Pa., on Saturday, July 13, though he was pulled off the stage and pronounced safe. A former local fire chief attending the rally, Corey Comperatore, was killed. Two other attendees were hospitalized.
Compounding matters, on Monday, Ms. Cheatle faced a contentious group of lawmakers at the House Oversight Committee who were frustrated at her lack of specific answers on what happened that led to the assassination attempt on Mr. Trump. At one point, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, asked for a timeline from the day of the shooting.
“I have a timeline that does not have specifics,” she said.
By the end of the hearing, lawmakers from both parties were calling for her to step down, including Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat from Maryland, who is the ranking member of the committee.
“The director has lost the confidence of Congress, at a very urgent and tender moment in the history of the country,” Mr. Raskin said.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro N. Mayorkas, to whom the Secret Service answers, previously described the shooting as a security failure.
Almost immediately after the shooting, Ms. Cheatle faced an onslaught of criticism from Republican lawmakers who said she was directly to blame for security lapses surrounding the attempt on Mr. Trump’s life.
She described the agency’s performance as “unacceptable,” in interviews after the shooting.
“The buck stops with me,” she said in an interview with ABC News on July 15. “I am the director of the Secret Service, and I need to make sure that we are performing a review and that we are giving resources to our personnel as necessary.”
Last week, Senators John Barrasso of Wyoming and Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, both Republicans, tracked Ms. Cheatle down at the Republican National Convention. Ms. Cheatle led security for the event where Mr. Trump accepted the nomination.
“You put him within less than an inch of his life,” Mr. Barrasso said in a video capturing the interaction. “So resignation or full explanation.”
Speaker Mike Johnson and Chris LaCivita, a top Trump campaign aide, said last week Ms. Cheatle should no longer serve in the role.
“President Biden needs to fire the Director of the Secret Service, Kimberly Cheatle, immediately,” Mr. Johnson wrote in a post on X. “We lost an American hero on Saturday and were millimeters away from losing President Trump. It is inexcusable.”
In the days after the shooting, top Biden administration officials publicly backed Ms. Cheatle, including Mr. Mayorkas.
“I will tell you that my confidence in Kim is 100 percent,” he said three days after the shooting.
Ms. Cheatle served in several leadership roles at the agency, including as an assistant director, during her tenure. In 2019, she took a position as a lead security official for PepsiCo in North America, before returning to the agency in September 2022.
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