Secret Service ‘solely responsible’ for Trump rally security design, implementation: Director
U.S. Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle said in a Tuesday interview that her agency is “solely responsible” for the plan and execution of security at the Pennsylvania rally where former President Trump was shot over the weekend.
“At that particular site, we divided up areas of responsibility, but the Secret Service is totally responsible for the design and implementation and the execution of the site,” Cheatle told CNN’s Whitney Wild on Tuesday evening.
Her comment comes amid heightened scrutiny of the federal agency and its leadership, after a gunman’s grazed Trump’s ear with a shot at a campaign event Saturday in a shooting that killed one attendee and injured two others. The assassination attempt was one of the greatest security lapses by the federal agency since then-President Reagan was shot in 1981.
Questions have mounted in recent days about how a 20-year-old gunman was able to climb to a nearby rooftop and get a clear line of sight to the former president at the campaign event in Butler, Pa. He was shot and killed by Secret Service countersnipers shortly after opening fire.
Cheatle told Wild that no assets were diverted from Trump’s rally that day.
Earlier Tuesday, the Secret Service director told ABC News in an interview that that the building from which the suspected gunman fired shots was the responsibility of local law enforcement to secure.
“What I was trying to stress was that we just divided up areas of responsibility, and they provided support to those areas of responsibility,” Cheatle said, clarifying her previous statements about the local law enforcement, adding that the Secret Service “couldn’t do our job without them.”
Cheatle also added there were “safety factors” to consider when developing a plan to secure the building, noting that it had a sloped roof, “so the decision was made to secure the building from inside.”
“What happened is a terrible incident and should never happen,” she said. “And we are obviously going to make sure move forward we take whatever any lessons that come out of this and adjust accordingly.”
The director noted she has had calls with “a number of personnel” who were working the rally and said she intends to talk to the rest of the people involved.
“They’re obviously difficult conversations. Everyone [who] works for the Secret Service never wants to have a day like that,” Cheatle said. “We perform our job flawlessly. The people who covered and evacuated the president on that day, the countersniper — performed their job flawlessly, and I’m very proud of the actions that they took.”
Cheatle has faced calls to resign in recent days, but she has pledged to stay on in her post.
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