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Republican firebrand Marjorie Taylor Greene fired off a string of tweets attacking Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle as she was grilled by House members on Monday over her agency’s failure to prevent an assassination attempt on Donald Trump during a rally rural Pennsylvania earlier this month.
The House Oversight Committee asked Cheatle to testify after the former president was struck in the ear by a bullet at the campaign event in Butler, Pennsylvania — where one spectator was killed and two others were critically injured.
The shooter, 20-year-old Thomas Crooks, was killed at the scene. But lawmakers have raised questions as to why Crooks, who was considered a suspicious person at the rally, wasn’t stopped before opening fire on the GOP nominee.
“I’ve never seen a more incompetent woman in my life. Cheatle should have resigned,” Greene, who sits on the Oversight Committee, said of Cheatle in a post shared on X during the hearing. “Instead she’s covering it all up, refusing to answer questions and hand over information.”
“She may be more than incompetent. She may be complicit,” the Republican congresswoman baselessly claimed.
There is no evidence to suggest that Cheatle had anything to do with the attack. But the 27-year veteran of the agency was contrite at the House hearing, admitting that the shooting amounted to the “most significant operational failure at the Secret Service in decades.”
Greene wasn’t the only House member to call for Cheatle’s resignation.
Oversight Committee Chair James Comer, a Republican, and Rep. Ro Khanna, a Democrat on the panel, also suggested on Monday that Cheatle should step down over the incident.
“You cannot go leading a Secret Service agency when there is an assassination attempt on a presidential candidate,” Khanna said. “I would say that about anyone.”
For her part, Cheatle said that she takes “full responsibility for any security lapse” and will “move heaven and earth to ensure that an incident like July 13th does not happen again.”
Despite a barrage of calls for her to step down, in her opening statements, she told the House panel: “I think that I am the best person to lead the Secret Service at this time.”
