Secret service

Joe Lancaster | 7.22.2024 4:10 PM

On Monday, Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle appeared before the House Oversight Committee, a little over a week after the attempted assassination against former President Donald Trump.

While there was certainly some partisan grandstanding, both Republican and Democratic representatives took Cheatle to task over the blatant security failure.

On July 13, 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks fired multiple shots as Trump spoke at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania; a bullet grazed Trump's ear, two other attendees were wounded, and a former Buffalo fire chief, Corey Comperatore, was killed while shielding his wife and two daughters. Crooks had climbed onto the roof of a nearby building and perched on his stomach with a semiautomatic rifle; a Secret Service sniper shot and killed Crooks a few seconds after the shooting started.

In the ensuing days, details came out that looked even worse for the Secret Service. Rallygoers had identified Crooks to law enforcement as a suspicious person more than an hour before the shooting, and Secret Service snipers spotted him on the roof 20 minutes before he started firing. Cheatle claimed that agents were not posted on top of that building because its "sloped roof" presented a "safety factor," but she gave no explanation for why the building was not included in the Secret Service's security perimeter (nor how a 20-year-old with no tactical training was able to traverse the........

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