Secret Service director resigns amid criticism of Trump security handling
The Secret Service director, Kimberly Cheatle, has resigned, the Associated Press reports, following a bipartisan furor over whether her agency had adequately protected Donald Trump in the lead-up to the assassination attempt against him.
Cheatle stepped down one day after making a disastrous appearance before the House oversight committee, where lawmakers from both parties signaled frustration with her inability to answer many questions about the shooting that wounded Trump, killed an attender at his rally in Butler, Pennsylvania and wounded two others.
At the hearing’s conclusion, the committee’s top Democrat joined with its Republican chair to ask for Cheatle’s resignation:
Key events
Top congressional Democrats to endorse Harris – report
The Senate’s Democratic leader Chuck Schumer and his counterpart in the House, minority leader Hakeem Jeffries, will endorse Kamala Harris at a press conference at 1pm, Politico reports.
While many Democratic lawmakers have jumped on board with Harris’s bid for the presidency following Joe Biden’s decision to step down, Schumer and Jeffries have yet to do so. Three people familiar with their plans say they will make the announcement at a rare joint appearance at the headquarters of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee in Washington DC this afternoon.
Top Democrats are meanwhile digesting the historic upheaval on the presidential ticket, after Joe Biden ended his re-election campaign and Kamala Harris swiftly took his place.
The decision has left in an awkward spot lawmakers who stridently defended Biden, even after his disastrous performance at his debate against Donald Trump last month. Among that group is the senator Chris Coons of Biden’s home state Delaware, who told ABC Biden was the “only” Democrat able to beat Trump.
In an interview with CNN today, Coons walked back that comment, and announced his support for Harris: “I would welcome a chance to revise and extend those remarks, because underlying that was my confidence that the record that President Biden and Vice-President Harris have built over the last three and a half years is the strongest legislative record of any first-term presidency in my lifetime.”
He continued:
And Kamala Harris was right beside Joe Biden every step of the way as they strengthened Nato, as they came up with creative and powerful combinations of allies and partners in the Indo-Pacific, as they got to the president’s desk legislative accomplishments that reduce the price of prescription drugs, that invested in the fight against climate change, that made our communities safer with strong gun safety legislation.
I will say that on every one of those core points, Vice-President Harris will continue, will get the job done, and, Donald Trump, the former president, will roll it back.
Jamie Raskin is the top Democrat on the House oversight committee, and yesterday joined the Republican committee chair, James Comer – with whom he seldom agrees – in calling for Kimberly Cheatle’s resignation as director of the Secret Service.
But Raskin also said the shooting at Donald Trump’s rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, underscored the continued danger of assault weapons in America, and called on Congress to pass legislation banning them. In a statement after Cheatle stepped down from her role, Raskin reiterated that position. Here’s more:
Yesterday’s Oversight Committee hearing identified two urgent priorities in the wake of the assassination attempt against former President Donald Trump and the accompanying mass shooting. The first was the need for Director Cheatle to step down and give new leadership at the Secret Service the opportunity to swiftly address this crisis, rebuild the trust of Congress and the American people, and guarantee security to protectees. We accomplished that today.
The other urgent need was to ban assault weapons to protect the rest of us from mass shootings like the one that took place in Butler. As I made clear during yesterday’s hearing, a weapon that can be used to commit a mass shooting at an event under the full protection of the Secret Service and state and local police is a danger to schoolchildren, Walmart shoppers and congregants in church, synagogue and mosque services. As a weapon of war, the AR-15 has no legitimate place in our society. Congress must act now.
Biden to address nation from Oval Office on Wednesday evening
Joe Biden will make his first speech since ending his bid for re-election from the Oval Office on Wednesday evening, Reuters reports.
The speech, scheduled for 8pm ET, will detail “what lies ahead, and how I will finish the job for the American people”, the president said, according to Reuters.
The president is scheduled to return to the White House today from Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, where he has been recovering after coming down with Covid-19 last week.
Republican House speaker Johnson says Secret Service director’s resignation ‘overdue’
In reaction to Secret Service director Kimberly Cheatle’s resignation, the Republican speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, said it was overdue, and promised to continue investigating the security failures that allowed the assassination attempt on Donald Trump:
Director Cheatle answered our calls to resign. Good. ⁰⁰Now our task force will quickly and thoroughly investigate the assassination attempt on President Trump and hold those responsible accountable. pic.twitter.com/s1tAVm35DQ
— Speaker Mike Johnson (@SpeakerJohnson) July 23, 2024
Biden says he will appoint new Secret Service director ‘soon’
In a brief statement, Joe Biden thanked Kimberly Cheatle for her tenure as director of the Secret Service, and said he would soon appoint her replacement.
“Jill and I are grateful to Director Kim Cheatle for her decades of public service. She has selflessly dedicated and risked her life to protect our nation throughout her career in the United States Secret Service. We especially thank her for answering the call to lead the Secret Service during our Administration and we are grateful for her service to our family,” the president said.
He continued:
As a leader, it takes honor, courage, and incredible integrity to take full responsibility for an organization tasked with one of the most challenging jobs in public service.
The independent review to get to the bottom of what happened on July 13 continues, and I look forward to assessing its conclusions. We all know what happened that day can never happen again. As we move forward, I wish Kim all the best, and I will plan to appoint a new Director soon.
James Comer, the Republican chair of the House oversight committee, said the Secret Service director, Kimberly Cheatle, “instilled no confidence” when she appeared before his committee yesterday.
“The Oversight Committee’s hearing resulted in Director Cheatle’s resignation and there will be more accountability to come. The Secret Service has a no-fail mission yet it failed historically on Director Cheatle’s watch. At yesterday’s Oversight Committee hearing, Director Cheatle instilled no confidence that she has the ability to ensure the Secret Service can meet its protective mission,” Comer said.
“Egregious security failures leading up to and at the Butler, Pennsylvania campaign rally resulted in the assassination attempt of President Trump, the murder of an innocent victim, and harm to others in the crowd. While Director Cheatle’s resignation is a step toward accountability, we need a full review of how these security failures happened so that we can prevent them going forward. We will continue our oversight of the Secret Service in support of the House Task Force to deliver transparency, accountability, and solutions to ensure this never happens again.”
That last sentence is a reference to the bipartisan taskforce the Republican House speaker, Mike Johnson, and the Democratic minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, have proposed creating to investigate the assassination attempt.
As news broke that the Secret Service director, Kimberly Cheatle, had resigned amid criticism of her handling of Donald Trump’s security, the former president wrote this, on Truth Social:
The Biden/Harris Administration did not properly protect me, and I was forced to take a bullet for Democracy. IT WAS MY GREAT HONOR TO DO SO!
Secret Service director resigns amid criticism of Trump security handling
The Secret Service director, Kimberly Cheatle, has resigned, the Associated Press reports, following a bipartisan furor over whether her agency had adequately protected Donald Trump in the lead-up to the assassination attempt against him.
Cheatle stepped down one day after making a disastrous appearance before the House oversight committee, where lawmakers from both parties signaled frustration with her inability to answer many questions about the shooting that wounded Trump, killed an attender at his rally in Butler, Pennsylvania and wounded two others.
At the hearing’s conclusion, the committee’s top Democrat joined with its Republican chair to ask for Cheatle’s resignation:
CNN data analyst Harry Enten comes to a similar conclusion about the state of the presidential race, as Kamala Harris takes over the Democratic ticket.
Donald Trump remains a strong candidate because his favorability is notably high, he says. However, a significant share of voters have no opinion of Harris yet – potentially an opportunity for her to grow her support:
Beating Trump won’t be easy. His favorable rating is higher now than it has ever been (per two polls taken over the weekend).
Harris may poll better than Biden did against Trump, but Trump is running 5 points ahead nationally against her than he finished against Biden in 2020. pic.twitter.com/cnOtUKtWXe
— (((Harry Enten))) (@ForecasterEnten) July 23, 2024
‘Harris enters the fray with numbers similar to President Biden’, new poll finds
Another poll taken partly after Joe Biden suspended his re-election campaign has found a tied race between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump.
Quinnipiac University reports 49% of registered voters nationally support Trump and 47% back Harris – basically a tie, since the finding is within the margin of error. The poll was conducted from Friday of last week through Sunday.
As Quinnipiac University polling analyst Tim Malloy puts it:
The dramatic reset at the top of the Democratic ticket does little to move the race as vice-president Harris enters the fray with numbers similar to president Biden.
Perhaps the poll’s biggest finding is that independents prefer Trump overall. He has 55% support from the critical group, compared to 41% for Harris.
Biden condemns political violence after Ohio state senator’s ‘civil war’ comment
Joe Biden has once again condemned political violence after an Ohio state senator warned of “a civil war to save the country” as he spoke ahead of Donald Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, at a rally yesterday:
Folks, calls to violence threaten our democracy’s foundation.
You can’t love your country only when you win.
Let’s solve our problems with ballots and elect @KamalaHarris as the next President of the United States of America.pic.twitter.com/wfREMvAyNo
— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) July 23, 2024
The senator, George Lang, has since apologized for his remarks:
Kamala Harris is today heading to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the largest city in a swing state that has played a pivotal role in handing both Joe Biden and Donald Trump the presidency.
It also hosted the Republican national convention last week, during which Trump once again accepted the party’s nomination for president, and debuted Ohio senator JD Vance as his running mate.
According to the vice-president’s schedule, she will depart Washington DC at 10.40am ET, and hold her event in Milwaukee at 2.05pm – which we plan to cover live.
She’ll return to the capital later in the afternoon.
Today is merely the second full day of Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign, but she already has the delegates necessary to clinch the Democratic nomination, and has raised tens of millions of dollars. As the Guardian’s Richard Luscombe reports, the task before her now is to reintroduce herself to the voters who will decide the election:
Kamala Harris enters the second full day of her campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination on Tuesday in an almost unassailable position, following a whirlwind 24 hours that saw almost every senior party figure championing her candidacy.
The rapid pace at which the vice-president racked up endorsements was matched by an avalanche of donations to the newly branded Harris for President campaign, which had already inherited Joe Biden’s $96m when he abandoned his re-election effort on Sunday.
More than $81m poured into campaign coffers in its first day, a spokesperson said on Monday, calling it the largest single-day haul of any presidential candidate in history and with most of the money coming from grassroots donors making their first contributions of the election cycle.
Campaign officials, however, were equally as enthused by the succession of heavyweight Democrats who voiced their support for Harris, notably Nancy Pelosi, the former speaker who called the vice-president “brilliantly astute” and “rooted in strong values, faith and a commitment to public service”.
The election gurus at the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics have a similar take on Kamala Harris’s effect on the presidential race.
They had previously forecast a very tough road for Joe Biden seeking re-election, with Nevada, Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania as toss-ups, and Minnesota and New Hampshire – two states where Biden and other Democrats have triumphed in recent elections – as merely leaning Democratic.
They don’t forecast any major changes to that dynamic with Harris now set to be on ballots in Biden’s place, but note she has the opportunity to re-engage with Democratic voters in a way the president could not:
The new race probably does not start as a 50-50 proposition – Trump remains favored to a small but hardly overwhelming degree, and there’s a lot of uncertainty (and no useful recent historical precedent) for the presidential race changing in such a dramatic way this late in the political calendar. We had become very skeptical of Biden’s ability to pull this race back into true Toss-up status; Harris likely has a better chance to do so, though she’s not guaranteed to.
The argument for Harris’s upside is that she helps restore lagging Democratic enthusiasm and gives voters a new option in a race where many have long desired one, and we completely understand why so many Democrats urged Biden to step aside. Democrats seem thrilled and invigorated by having a more active candidate. But there are of course unknowns and obstacles too.
One of those is the possibility that Harris will be seen as too liberal by voters, and Trump more moderate – despite his policies lining up quite closely with the rightwing Project 2025:
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