Finally, what many American political experts predicted has happened: Kimberly Cheatle resigned on Tuesday, July 23, as the director of the United States Secret Service, 10 days after the security failure in the assassination attempt on the young Thomas Matthew Crooks towards the Republican candidate, Donald Trump. Additionally, in the incident, firefighter Cory Comperatore died and two other people were left in critical condition.
"I take full responsibility for the security breach. In light of recent events, I have taken with great sorrow the difficult decision to step down from the position of director," she stated in a statement.
This Monday, Cheatle had testified before the House of Representatives in the Capitol, and without making many excuses about what happened, she was honest in stating that it "was the agency's most significant failure in decades." Her words further intensified the pressure among the congressmen present, both Democrats and Republicans, who only expressed in their demands that the 53-year-old woman resign from her position.
Who is Kimberly Cheatle?
Originally from Illinois, she studied at a Catholic high school in Danville, about 130 kilometers south of Chicago, and at Eastern Illinois University, where she graduated in 1992.
Cheatle was the second woman to lead the Secret Service, performing various roles, including special agent in charge of the Atlanta field office; special agent in charge of the agency's training center in Laurel, Maryland, and deputy director of the protection operations office.
That office, where he worked before going to PepsiCo, is responsible for developing technology to protect facilities and events. Among his most memorable moments, on September 11, 2001, he was part of the team that led vicepresident Dick Cheney from the White House to a secure bunker after planes crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.