Secret Service Director says the roof was too steep for snipers
Rg said Cheatle’s actions “failed to protect the president,” and Indiana Rep. Jim Banks added that her defenses “ring hollow.”
Rep. Boebert said, “The Secret Service failed to protect President Trump. We can’t trust them to protect us.”
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis also reacted to Cheatle’s comments and defended the Secret Service protecting Trump.
“I think the Secret Service was able to react quickly once something happened, but we also know that there was a lot of buildup and intel that suggested that there could be a problem, and the fact that they didn’t have snipers on the roof just floors me,” DeSantis said.
“What that means is that they weren’t fully prepared for something that they had every reason to anticipate.”
Meanwhile, former President Donald Trump urged Cheatle to resign her post as Secret Service director. The former president argued that the agency failures had left him vulnerable to attack – bemoaning the incident as an “attempted assassination,” despite initial reports from the Secret Service to the contrary.
Trump said, Cheatle must “immediately resign. This won’t be the last time things like this happen if she is allowed to stay on as Director of the United States Secret Service.”
However, Cheatle was the longest-serving director of the Secret Service before Saturday’s shooting and has held the chief spot since 2020.
ABC had the explosive exchange with Cheatle as the exclusive lifter of the shooting aftermath details after Cheatle confirmed not once but twice that there were no snipers on the rooftop that the shooter targeted from.
When she was asked if federal officials considered instead of sniper positions why not just have camera surveillance monitoring the building roof, Cheatle responded by saying, “It wasn’t something that was considered. It was not something that was brought to our attention and raised casually that, hey, do we have something from a camera perspective that we may need to kind of close this gap.”
Four people were injured in the shooting at the event, including Trump, who was grazed by a bullet. The former president has since been meeting with victims of the attack and thanking them for their courage and heroism in the face of danger.
The FBI is also serving as a lead investigative agency into the shooting.
