Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle is set to appear for a highly anticipated hearing before the House Oversight Committee on Monday morning as lawmakers begin investigating what failures led to an assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump.
Cheatle’s appearance, along with a House Judiciary Committee hearing on Wednesday featuring FBI Director Christopher Wray, will mark the first of two public events in the House this week that will examine how and why a would-be assassin was able to take shots at Trump during a recent campaign rally.
The House Oversight Committee, a deeply divided Republican-led panel that has been dominated this Congress by a one-sided impeachment inquiry, has shown rare bipartisanship ahead of the hearing.
Its top Republican and Democrat, Reps. James Comer (R-KY) and Jamie Raskin (D-MD), said in a joint statement that while they often have “passionate disagreements,” they want to prevent the “horrific event from ever happening again.”
“Americans have many serious questions about the historic security failures” and they deserve “transparency and accountability,” the pair said, a sign that Cheatle is likely to have few allies when she sits down in the hearing room to take questions from members of Congress.
Authorities say Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20, was perched on a nearby rooftop when he fired multiple shots into a rally crowd, killing one and critically injuring two. Photos and video footage show a bullet nearly missing Trump’s head and instead grazing the side of it, resulting in a minor injury to the former president’s ear.
A committee aide told the Washington Examiner to expect lawmakers to grill Cheatle on what intelligence her agency had on the shooter, the planning in the lead-up to the rally, how the Secret Service deployed its resources, and why the rooftop, situated about 400 feet from Trump, was not secured.
There will likely also be questions about the timeline of events at the rally “given they were aware there was a suspicious person walking around with a rangefinder,” the aide said.
Secret Service Deputy Director Ronald Rowe gave lawmakers a summary of the timeline during a briefing last week, saying Pennsylvania State Police alerted the Secret Service to Crooks 20 minutes before shots rang out. Rowe said Crooks had a rangefinder, a firearm accessory used to take long shots, with him.
Cheatle, who has worked at the Secret Service for 25 years, is under enormous pressure to provide answers to lawmakers as she faces widespread calls from Republicans to resign. Democrats have been remiss to go that far before hearing directly from Cheatle, but Oversight Committee member Jared Moskowitz (D-FL) also said in a recent television interview that he believes she will likely have to step down.
The FBI, for its part, is leading the investigation into the shooting, and more than a week after the assassination attempt, the bureau has not indicated that it has identified any motive of Crooks. FBI Deputy Director Paul Abbate told lawmakers in last week’s briefing that the bureau found no evidence of Crooks having a political ideology after searching his primary phone, home, and vehicle. The FBI is still analyzing Crooks’s items and in the process of trying to access three foreign encrypted platforms on his phone, Abbate said.
Wray is expected to be interrogated on the investigation process at his own hearing before the House Judiciary Committee.
The hearing was already scheduled as part of the committee’s annual oversight of the FBI, but the committee announced after the rally shooting that Wray would be questioned about the attack during his appearance. Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) asked Wray last week for numerous records related to the assassination attempt in advance of his anticipated testimony.
Jordan also put Wray on the hook for the security failures, saying he heard from whistleblowers that the FBI was part of the security planning process when a Secret Service special agent in charge revealed that resources were “limited” the week of the rally because of the NATO summit in Washington, D.C.
Other committees, including the House Homeland Security Committee and Senate Judiciary and Homeland Security committees, have all indicated that they are investigating the assassination attempt as well.
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Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin (D-IL) had initially asked for a closed-door briefing about the assassination attempt, while committee Republicans called for a hearing.
Durbin agreed to a hearing, and now discussions on the details of it are being worked out among the Biden administration, Durbin, and ranking member Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), according to a Senate aide. The aide added that the hearing would most likely focus on both the Secret Service and FBI.
