ICYMI: ‘I said what everyone was thinking’: the Woman Who Roasted the Secret Service
When Nancy Mace, a South Carolina Representative, turned up at a congressional oversight hearing with the head of the Secret Service a week after Donald Trump was targeted by a sniper at a rally, she expected some answers.
What she got, she tells me when we meet in Manhattan, was obfuscation. Her resulting encounter with Kimberly Cheatle, then director of the Secret Service, so frustrated her that footage of it immediately went viral.
“You’re full of shit today,” said Mace, in a hot pink dress, during a brutal four-hour hearing in which Cheatle was eviscerated by Republicans and Democrats alike for her failure both to stop the gunman, and to answer their questions.
“I simply in my frustration — with the dodging, with the dishonesty — was simply saying aloud what everyone in the country, perhaps everyone in the world was thinking watching her performance on Monday,” said Mace.
“She was either unwilling, or unable to provide any answers,” she added. “It was a disgrace. And she should have been fired.”
“You’re just being completely dishonest,” Mace told Cheatle, as the committee chairman interjected that they should maintain decorum. “You are being dishonest or lying. You’re being dishonest here with this committee. These are important questions that the American people want answers to, and you’re just dodging and talking about it in generalities. We had to subpoena you to be here, and you won’t even answer the questions. We’ve asked you repeatedly to answer our questions. This isn’t hard.”
“They’re acting like this is not their fault,” said Mace, referring to the Secret Service. “Somebody has to take responsibility, someone has to take accountability. And we ought to have answers to know how this happened.”
Byron Donalds, a Florida Republican, accused Cheatle of “gross incompetence”, while Jared Moskowitz, a Florida Democrat, called her testimony “unacceptable”. Jamie Raskin, a Maryland Democrat, called for her resignation, while Lisa McClain, a Republican from Michigan, asked her if she had Alzheimer’s or dementia.
Nancy Mace asked Cheatle, then head of the Secret Service, “Would you like to use my five minutes to draft your resignation letter?” In a deeply divided country, the belief that Cheatle was bad at her job was, it seemed, the one factor bringing American politicians together.
Under questioning, Cheatle insisted that she was the best person to lead the Secret Service at this time. She admitted that the attack had been the “most significant operational failure” in the agency for decades. And she said, repeatedly, that she took full responsibility for the lapses in security that had allowed the gunman to fire eight bullets at the former president.
The next day, she resigned. Several investigations, including one by the FBI, continue. Last week, after the public hearing and Cheatle’s resignation, Ronald Rowe, the new Secret Service acting director, held a closed briefing about the assassination attempt.
Police snipers return fire in Butler. The shooting left one rally-goer dead and two others in critical condition
The agency said that Rowe was “committed to providing details and answering questions that could not be answered in Monday’s public congressional hearing due to operational security and ongoing investigations.”
Yet two weeks after Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20, a middle-class loner from Pennsylvania, took up his position on a roof about 400ft from where Donald Trump was speaking to a crowd of thousands, the fallout from the attack is still growing, as key questions remain unanswered and debates over whether the Secret Service is “woke” escalate in the vacuum.
Since the hearing with the oversight committee on Monday, Mace says she’s had the opportunity to reflect on the episode. And if anything, she thinks she and her colleagues uncovered a cover-up.
“Part of me believes that perhaps they didn’t share information with her [Cheatle] purposely, in anticipation of her testifying before Congress. If it’s not incompetency, it’s conspiracy,” she tells me, later adding: “I mean, they clearly didn’t want any information getting out.
The “they” she is referring to, she says, is the FBI and Department of Homeland Security, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, and other Secret Service agents implicated in the security failures that day.
“Clearly this is one of the most egregious acts to happen in recent history,” Mace told me. “Clearly they’re embarrassed that it happened, it should never have happened. And it shows some of the flaws within the Secret Service, either via a lack of training, or a lack of execution, lack of leadership at the top of the Secret Service. And so I believe we need to overhaul the agency.”
Some facts have emerged throughout the week: According to Christopher Wray, the FBI director who testified to the House judiciary committee on Wednesday, the shooter first went to the arena on July 5. The following day, Crooks searched online for “how far away was Oswald from Kennedy”, referring to the 1963 assassination of President John F Kennedy.
On July 13, the morning of the rally, he returned to the site and looked around before leaving to buy 50 rounds of ammunition. He then returned in the afternoon and flew a drone over the area. Two hours later, he opened fire on Trump using what may have been a rifle with a collapsible stock, which might have made it easier for him to hide it from law enforcement officers.
“It’s fair to say we do not yet have a clear picture of his motive,” Wray said during the hearing.
Claims that the gunman was spotted by a countersniper, walking around with a rangefinder 20 minutes before the attack, as well as reports from several civilians who said they had flagged his presence to the authorities, have raised further questions about why he wasn’t stopped.
While Mace says she believes there could be a “conspiracy” designed to hide the flaws of the federal agencies who oversaw the response to the shooting, many of her colleagues in the Republican Party believe, based on absolutely no proof, that the shooting was a plot by the left, or the federal government, to take down Trump.
Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Georgia Republican who is one of the party’s top fundraisers, wrote last week on Twitter/X: “I have so many questions about how this 20-year-old was able to nearly pull off assassinating Pres Trump by himself. This reeks of something a lot more sinister and bigger. There are too many things that do not make sense. I don’t care what anyone says about me saying this, because everyone knows we are all thinking it. Fine, call me a conspiracy theorist. I don’t give a damn. The insane left have been fantasizing out loud about killing Trump for years. Prove me wrong.”
At the Republican National Convention this month, held a few days after the shooting, the idea that Trump was the victim of an inside job by the federal government, directed by the Biden administration, was treated by many as a very likely explanation for the attack, despite the absolute lack of proof. President Biden, in the wake of the shooting, called for Americans to reject political violence.
As the recriminations flow, Republicans like Mace have attempted to shoehorn a favored talking point, the debate over diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) hiring practices, into the discussion over security failures around the rally on July 13.
Tim Burchett, a Republican from Tennessee, called Cheatle a “DEI horror story”. Based on a photograph showing a female agent shorter than the 6ft 3in Trump standing next to him when he was shot, Mace questioned whether “DEI hiring practices” had resulted in the agent in question being given the job.
When pressed, Mace said that, man or woman, the Secret Service should have assigned a taller agent to protect Trump. “She left his entire front torso and his face and his head exposed,” she said, later adding: “I’m sure we could find a female agent who’s taller and could cover up his body.”
There is no proof at all that the agent had been given her job as part of a DEI measure. A spokesperson for the Secret Service said that the agency was “appalled by the disparaging and disgusting comments against any of our personnel”.
They added: “As an elite law enforcement agency, all of our agents and officers are highly trained and fully capable of performing our missions. It is an insult to the women of our agency to imply that they are unqualified based on gender.”