Dem
51
GOP
49
Someone had to pay for the too-close-for-comfort assassination attempt on Donald Trump, and now someone has. Following a very poor appearance before the House Oversight Committee on Monday, USSS Director Kimberly Cheatle announced her resignation yesterday.
The initial failure was surely not Cheatle's fault, since she can hardly be expected to oversee every set of arrangements made by every USSS protective detail. Similarly, she's clearly not responsible for other high-profile USSS missteps in recent years, like the guy who hopped the White House fence while Barack Obama was in residence, or the advance scouts who got drunk and hired a bunch of prostitutes in Colombia. But someone's head had to roll, and she was the obvious target by virtue of her job, and then that awful performance at the hearing.
As we note above, Trump is trying to politicize this by blaming Cheatle's failures on the Biden administration. Since she was indeed appointed by Biden, that line of attack might work if Biden was still the Democratic candidate for president. We think it will be rather harder to pin the blame for a less-than-stellar USSS director on someone who was vice president, and had no official role in the selection. (Z)