Kimberly Cheatle has two reputations to save: the Secret Service’s and her own
For nearly 30 years, Cheatle’s job in the Secret Service gave her a front-row seat to history – until the weekend, when she became a part of it.
Kimberly Cheatle applied to join the Secret Service before she graduated from university in 1992. For nearly 30 years, the job gave her a front-row seat to history – until Saturday, when she became a part of it.
As a young agent, Ms Cheatle was part of a team that secured then vice president Dick Cheney on September 11, 2001, working in the White House at a moment when many feared Washington was facing an imminent attack.
She later served on then vice president Joe Biden’s protective detail, where she was assigned to Jill Biden and built a rapport with her through a combination of competence and affability, former agents said.
After a year-long stint in the private sector, Ms Cheatle returned in 2022 to run the agency that shaped her life.
She now finds herself the public face of the Secret Service’s biggest crisis in a generation: the near-assassination of Donald Trump by a 20-year-old gunman who inexplicably got a clear shot at the former president from a nearby rooftop that should have been secured during a Pennsylvania campaign rally.
Such a shocking lapse had become almost unthinkable in the decades since president Ronald Reagan was shot in 1981.
Ms Cheatle, 53, was largely unknown outside of Washington before Saturday’s shooting left Mr Trump with a bloody right ear and an audience member dead.
Her initial days in the spotlight haven’t gone particularly well. In an on-air interview with ABC News, Ms Cheatle said she was ultimately responsible for any failure to secure the Butler, Pennsylvania, site where Mr Trump was campaigning for a return to the White House.
But she made a widely panned comment about the rooftop being too sloped for law enforcement, and she said that local police were responsible for the building where the gunman was perched, comments perceived as unfair finger-pointing by others in the law-enforcement community.
Hours later, in the middle of the night, the Secret Service issued a cleanup statement on social media that sought to clarify that it wasn’t blaming its local partners for the incident.
House of Representatives and Senate lawmakers said they received damning details of the security failures in Wednesday briefings in which law-enforcement officials said, among other things, that the gunman, Thomas Matthew Crooks, was identified as suspicious more than an hour before he fired the first shot.
The details prompted anger and frustration on Capitol Hill, and a growing list of Republicans, including Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell and House of Representatives Speaker Mike Johnson have called for Ms Cheatle to resign.
“The Secret Service lost sight of him. No one has taken responsibility. No one has been held responsible,” said Senator John Barrasso, a Wyoming Republican. “The head of the Secret Service needs to go.”
Secret Service spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said in a statement that “continuity of operations is paramount during a critical incident and US Secret Service director Kimberly Cheatle has no intentions to step down.”
On Wednesday night, senators attending the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee confronted Ms Cheatle, demanding answers about the shooting.
“You owe president Trump answers!” shouted Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, according to a video posted on social media by Senator Blackburn.
The House oversight committee has subpoenaed Ms Cheatle, demanding that she testify at a July 22 hearing.
In a letter reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, a top Department of Homeland Security official said Ms Cheatle welcomes the opportunity to testify but asked that she be allowed to appear a few days later or the following week to accommodate her work and travel commitments.
The Secret Service’s deputy director, Ronald Rowe, in an interview on Wednesday defended Ms Cheatle’s leadership and said she wouldn’t resign.
“At a time when the country is reflecting on this horrific incident, at a time when members of congress are calling for answers, the American public is calling for answers, it probably would not serve this process to just jettison the agency head,” Mr Rowe said.
“When you’re in the midst of a crisis, it takes toughness. It takes intelligence. And it takes also a little bit of strategy,” he added.
“And she is demonstrating all of those traits at this time.”
Ms Cheatle first set her sights on a career in law enforcement after her brother died in a car accident in 1988, she later told the News-Gazette, an Illinois-based newspaper.
At the time, her brother had been pursuing a job as a state trooper, which later inspired Ms Cheatle to apply for the Secret Service while still a student at Eastern Illinois University, she said.
Ms Cheatle began her career in a Detroit field office and would go on to spend 27 years with the Secret Service, capping her initial tenure as the first woman to lead the office of protective operations, a division that handles the work most commonly associated with the agency.
The office oversees all protective details, including those for the president, vice president, visiting foreign dignitaries and former US presidents.
“She had all the cool guys and girls in suits and sunglasses,” a former agent said.
In that role, she coordinated Mr Trump’s security during the final years of his presidency and managed the Secret Service’s response to the Covid outbreak.
“I don’t think anybody had an instruction manual on how to deal with that, and she really guided us,” Mr Rowe said.
Ms Cheatle left the Secret Service in 2021. She worked for a year for PepsiCo, where her job included overseeing security for senior executives and the company’s vast food production infrastructure, according to a former PepsiCo executive.
“Burnout is real,” she told Security Magazine in a 2022 profile, adding that she had been working on home renovations as a hobby in her newfound time.
“This industry can be difficult, and it’s important to discover yourself.”
There are no official guidelines for a president in choosing a Secret Service director, and the position doesn’t require Senate confirmation.
Most presidents opt to select people for the post who have worked on details protecting presidents or vice presidents in the past, and who understand the growing security threats that public officials face.
In August 2022, as Mr Biden closed in on his selection of a new director, Secret Service officials arranged to get photographs of Ms Cheatle and at least one other top contender for the role in preparation for an announcement, according to a person familiar with the process.
Mr Biden appointed Ms Cheatle just days later, a quick turnaround that former agents viewed as underscoring the closeness of her relationship with the President and his wife.
In an announcement of the selection, Mr Biden said he and his wife “know first-hand Kim’s commitment to her job and to the Secret Service’s people and mission.” “She has my complete trust,” Mr Biden said.
Donald Mihalek, a retired Secret Service agent who worked at the agency at the same time as Ms Cheatle, said she had “all the prerequisites” for becoming the agency’s director. She worked her way up in the agency and served in supervisory roles, including senior-level jobs with the service.
Regarding the scrutiny Ms Cheatle is facing, Mr Mihalek said, “Some of it is politics – and some of it is fact-finding. They have a right to find out what happened, when it happened.”
Ms Cheatle is the second woman to serve as director of the Secret Service. Under her tenure, she has become known among current and former agents for embracing a push – known as the 30×30 Initiative – to have women fill more law-enforcement roles.
As director, Ms Cheatle has brought the Secret Service’s workforce above 8000 – with a goal of topping 10,000 by the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles – when law enforcement is seeing a decline in recruits, a spokesman said. She has also created a subsidy program for child and elderly care in light of the amount of time Secret Service employees spend travelling for work.
The agency has been under mounting scrutiny for years, including during the Obama administration when some agents hired sex workers while in Colombia, in advance of president Barack Obama’s arrival for the Summit of the Americas.
Over time, the Secret Service’s job has grown bigger and more challenging in a heated political environment, former officers said. The agency is also increasingly a punching bag for lawmakers from whichever party is out of power in Washington.
During Ms Cheatle’s tenure, the Secret Service nabbed negative headlines after an internal investigation found officers were on their personal phones as an intruder entered White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan’s house.
The incident led Ms Cheatle to increase penalties for officers who break agency protocol while on duty.
In July 2022, a month before she was appointed director, the Department of Homeland Security’s internal watchdog accused the Secret Service of erasing many text messages from the day of the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol and the previous day.
The Secret Service acknowledged that some employees’ phone data were lost during what it called a pre-planned technology change, but the agency has denied any wrongdoing and insisted it didn’t lose texts relevant to the attack.
During the Biden administration, agents have also been victims.
The Secret Service had to adjust its tactics for protecting Mr Biden because the family’s German shepherd repeatedly bit agents, including one who required six stitches.
Between October 2022 and July 2023, the agency recorded at least 24 biting incidents involving the dog as it menaced the West Wing, Camp David and the President’s home in Delaware, according to internal Secret Service emails posted online.
Jim Oberman, Katy Stech Ferek and Lindsay Wise contributed to this article.
The Wall Street Journal
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