Even by the nonexistent standards of America’s bloated and now-leaderless federal bureaucracy, it’s hard to believe that former Pepsi executive Kimberly Cheatle held onto her job for as long as she did. Cheatle is the director of the Secret Service, the agency that allowed a 20-year-old assassin to shoot the leading presidential candidate in the head just ten days ago. Or she was the director. It was just announced this morning that she is resigning from her position, finally.
It took a while, despite the fact that both parties, and Cheatle herself, readily admit that the best-case scenario here is that the Secret Service displayed stratospheric levels of incompetence — ineptitude so profound that it very nearly changed the course of world history. And yet Cheatle remained in office. In fact, Cheatle’s boss at D.H.S. said he has “100 percent” confidence in her. On top of that, Cheatle hasn’t fired or even disciplined a single employee of the Secret Service.
At a minimum, we are witnessing a staggering level of bureaucratic dysfunction. And after Cheatle’s testimony yesterday at the House oversight committee, there’s reason to think we’re seeing something even more sinister than that. Cheatle should resign. She should have resigned the day after Trump was nearly killed. But the way that she resigned, and the timing, only lends more credence to the idea that there’s a cover up going on. I’ll explain why.
Let’s begin with what happened on capitol hill yesterday. Throughout several hours of testimony, Cheatle acted more like a criminal with something to hide than the head of a government agency who has a legal duty to comply with a congressional subpoena. Cheatle refused to answer even basic questions about the attempt on Donald Trump’s life in Butler, Pennsylvania. These are questions that any competent investigator would have been able to answer within 24 hours of the shooting. These are questions that, in some cases, Cheatle said she knew the answer to — but she still refused to provide an answer to the committee. Again and again, Cheatle stonewalled. It was almost as if she wanted to avoid providing any information that could possibly be contradicted later, if the official narrative should have to change. Short of outright admitting that the assassination attempt was an inside job, Kimberly Cheatle could not possibly have done more to validate the so-called “conspiracy theories” surrounding what happened in Butler.
If the DOJ cared even slightly about the appearance of fairness and impartial justice, they’d immediately charge Kimberly Cheatle with evading her subpoena. Steve Bannon’s in jail for supposedly failing to comply with a subpoena, after all. And that’s precisely what Kimberly Cheatle did yesterday. We know that because she admitted it. Listen to this exchange between Cheatle and congresswoman Lisa McClain of Michigan. First, McClain gets Cheatle to acknowledge that she’s spoken to the FBI about their investigation into the assassination. Then the congresswoman asks Cheatle whether the FBI has determined how many shell casings were found on the roof, next to the shooter’s dead body. Watch:
This is one of the most basic questions of the entire investigation. It should have been disclosed to the public in a press conference within a day of the shooting: How many shell casings were on the roof with the shooter? There’s no conceivable, legitimate reason why the government would want to hide this information. But here we are, nine days later, and the head of the Secret Service won’t tell us. She admits she knows the truth. But she’s defying a congressional subpoena and refusing to talk about it anyway.
The number of shell casings on the roof is a critical piece of information. It would obviously give us insight into how many times the shooter fired from that particular rooftop. If the number of shell casings doesn’t match the number of shots we can hear from footage of the rally, then there’s a major problem with the official narrative. It could mean that the crime scene was tampered with. Or it could mean that there was more than one shooter, beyond the one who’s already been identified.
If those possibilities sound outlandish, take a look at Cheatle’s response to this question from congressman Andy Biggs. He asks her point-blank whether the shooter was acting alone. Watch:
Again, this should not be a difficult question to answer. She could say, “Yes, it seems he was acting alone.” Or she could say “We think he had help.” Or she could say she’s genuinely not sure at this point. Instead, she refuses to provide any kind of answer whatsoever. She says she has no information she can provide, and that the congressman should talk to the FBI. And of course, the FBI won’t answer the question either. This is the kind of bureaucratic runaround you’d expect to get when you try to cancel your phone plan. And it’s how the federal government is handling the investigation into the most serious attempt on the life of a presidential candidate (and former president) in decades.
Again, it’s hard to conceive of any innocent reason why she would decline to answer these questions if the answers line up with the official narrative. It shouldn’t take anywhere near this long to have some answers to these questions, even if those answers are tentative. Think of how quickly the police charged Jennifer and James Crumbley with involuntary manslaughter. Those were the parents who allowed their son to access their handgun, which he then used to commit a school shooting. They were charged in less than a week. Why haven’t police charged the parents who allowed the Trump assassin to access their rifle? Have the authorities been looking at anyone else to charge who might have helped him? Why don’t we have any answers to any of these questions?
Right now, we’re learning more from investigators on social media than we are from the Secret Service. Yesterday, for example, the “Oversight Project” — part of the Heritage Foundation — took a look at databases of mobile advertising data. They found that: “Someone who regularly visited [the shooters’] home and work also visited a building in Washington, DC located in Gallery Place. This is in the same vicinity of an @FBI office on June 26, 2023.”
Who is that person who links the shooter’s home to an area in Washington, D.C. near a mall and an FBI field office? We have no idea. It could be nothing. It could be significant. But the more the Secret Service stonewalls on basic questions, the more people are entitled to come up with their own theories and conduct their own investigation. That piece of reporting from the Heritage Foundation — whether it pans out or not — is more believable than anything Kimberly Cheatle said yesterday. She spent 95% of the time dodging every question she was asked.
In fact, at several points, Cheatle simply lied under oath. She didn’t just filibuster, or give the typical bureaucratic runaround. She actually lied. For example, here’s her answer when she was asked about the Secret Service’s DEI hiring policies. Watch:
“Everyone who moves through the application process has to meet the same standards to become a special agent.” That’s what the Secret Service director said under oath.
It’s not remotely true. Anyone with Google can verify that it’s not true. Female trainees in the Secret Service have drastically lower fitness standards than male trainees. For example, the Secret Service considers it “excellent” if a 29 year-old male applicant can complete 55 or more pushups. They’ll get maximum points on their fitness test, which is critical for getting the job. But a 29-year-old female applicant receives the same “excellent” score if she can complete just 40 pushups. The cut-off for a “good” score for a 29-year-old male is 46 pushups, while a woman can achieve a “Good score” with just 26 pushups.
In other words, the director of the Secret Service lied under oath. There’s no conceivable way that she’s not aware of her agency’s hiring standards. To the extent Kimberly Cheatle has done anything during her tenure, she’s been pushing DEI hiring. She stated publicly that she wants 30 percent of the agency to be female. And she understands that one way to achieve that result is to have lower standards for women. But when she’s asked about this under oath, she just denies it outright. She knows no one’s going to come after her for perjury.
I could go through the rest of Cheatle’s testimony, which isn’t any better than what I’ve shown you. At one point, Cheatle admits that she still hasn’t even visited the shooting site in Butler. That’s how little she cares. She also refused to explain why no one was guarding the roof where the shooter was positioned — saying only that there was some kind of “overwatch” on the roof, which clearly didn’t work. Cheatle also admitted that somehow she doesn’t have a timeline of events from that day. This was one of the moments during her testimony when people in the room burst out laughing at how absurd it was. Watch:
“I have a timeline that does not have specifics.” So she just showed up and winged it basically. It’s like watching an actor who was told to play the head of the Secret Service for a day. If you found some random woman off the street, and told her to stonewall Congress about the assassination attempt, how would the results be any different than this?
Separately, Cheatle said she didn’t sign off on the security plan for the event because she doesn’t sign off for the security plans at any events. When asked for the name of the person who did sign off on the security plan for the Butler rally, she wouldn’t say. In fact, she implied that many people sign off on these plans, so no single person can be blamed. It’s a classic bureaucratic coverup. Cheatle also refused to talk about all the times that the Secret Service turned down the Trump campaign’s requests for additional security. And on and on.
But there’s one more clip that is very important to see. It’s AOC going after Kimberly Cheatle. Online, a lot of people on the Right are praising AOC for this performance. But along with Mike Cernovich, I think it reveals something a lot more troubling than it appears. Watch:
AOC wasn’t the only Democrat to rip into Cheatle like this. Several Democrats did the same thing. And there’s two possible interpretations for that. One is that the security failures were so bad that Democrats are putting aside politics for the first time in modern history. They’re just as outraged as Trump supporters.
The other interpretation, however, is that whenever AOC agrees with the entire Republican caucus, we should take a step back and think about what’s going on. Maybe Kimberly Cheatle was sent out there to testify in order to serve as a sacrificial lamb. Maybe the point of this hearing was for both Democrats and Republicans to beat her up like a piñata. And then, when she inevitably resigns, members of both parties will feel like justice has been done. The problem has been solved. A replaceable cog in the bureaucratic machine has been removed. The implication would be: No need to look higher. No need to investigate any other connections this shooter may have had with the government. The problem is taken care of. And that seems to be exactly what happened. They knew they were going to force her resignation. But they had her testify to congress first. That way she could stonewall, absorb all the blame, and then leave. Now they can put someone else in charge of the agency who will not have to answer any questions at all.
That can’t be the end of it, though. For lack of a better word, these are very strange times right now in this country. It’s not even clear who’s running the federal government. We don’t know who has the authority to fire Kimberly Cheatle. The president of the United States is technically her boss. But he hasn’t been seen in public for several days. He allegedly just phoned into a rally for Kamala Harris, but no one could see his face. After weeks of insisting he’s not dropping out of the race, now he’s suddenly issuing full-throated endorsements for his running mate. Meanwhile the president’s brother is suggesting Biden doesn’t have long to live. And the press is pretending this is all completely normal.
But none of this is normal. We still don’t understand what just happened to Joe Biden. And from Kimberly Cheatle’s testimony, it looks like we may never know what happened in Butler, either. At the very least, the government won’t tell us. It’s hard to think of a stronger argument for completely dismantling the federal government bureaucracy if and when Donald Trump gets back into office. Even assuming they’re not actively trying to sabotage this country — which is quite an assumption at this point — then at the very least, these bureaucrats so incompetent that they’re destroying any faith that Americans have in the proper functioning of their government.
Mediocre men and women like Kimberly Cheatle are leading pretty much every federal agency in this country. And just like Joe Biden, these bureaucrats can’t be reasoned with. They can’t be shamed. They won’t go anywhere unless they’re forced to.
[#item_full_content]
[[{“value”:”
Even by the nonexistent standards of America’s bloated and now-leaderless federal bureaucracy, it’s hard to believe that former Pepsi executive Kimberly Cheatle held onto her job for as long as she did. Cheatle is the director of the Secret Service, the agency that allowed a 20-year-old assassin to shoot the leading presidential candidate in the head just ten days ago. Or she was the director. It was just announced this morning that she is resigning from her position, finally.
It took a while, despite the fact that both parties, and Cheatle herself, readily admit that the best-case scenario here is that the Secret Service displayed stratospheric levels of incompetence — ineptitude so profound that it very nearly changed the course of world history. And yet Cheatle remained in office. In fact, Cheatle’s boss at D.H.S. said he has “100 percent” confidence in her. On top of that, Cheatle hasn’t fired or even disciplined a single employee of the Secret Service.
At a minimum, we are witnessing a staggering level of bureaucratic dysfunction. And after Cheatle’s testimony yesterday at the House oversight committee, there’s reason to think we’re seeing something even more sinister than that. Cheatle should resign. She should have resigned the day after Trump was nearly killed. But the way that she resigned, and the timing, only lends more credence to the idea that there’s a cover up going on. I’ll explain why.
Let’s begin with what happened on capitol hill yesterday. Throughout several hours of testimony, Cheatle acted more like a criminal with something to hide than the head of a government agency who has a legal duty to comply with a congressional subpoena. Cheatle refused to answer even basic questions about the attempt on Donald Trump’s life in Butler, Pennsylvania. These are questions that any competent investigator would have been able to answer within 24 hours of the shooting. These are questions that, in some cases, Cheatle said she knew the answer to — but she still refused to provide an answer to the committee. Again and again, Cheatle stonewalled. It was almost as if she wanted to avoid providing any information that could possibly be contradicted later, if the official narrative should have to change. Short of outright admitting that the assassination attempt was an inside job, Kimberly Cheatle could not possibly have done more to validate the so-called “conspiracy theories” surrounding what happened in Butler.
If the DOJ cared even slightly about the appearance of fairness and impartial justice, they’d immediately charge Kimberly Cheatle with evading her subpoena. Steve Bannon’s in jail for supposedly failing to comply with a subpoena, after all. And that’s precisely what Kimberly Cheatle did yesterday. We know that because she admitted it. Listen to this exchange between Cheatle and congresswoman Lisa McClain of Michigan. First, McClain gets Cheatle to acknowledge that she’s spoken to the FBI about their investigation into the assassination. Then the congresswoman asks Cheatle whether the FBI has determined how many shell casings were found on the roof, next to the shooter’s dead body. Watch:
This is one of the most basic questions of the entire investigation. It should have been disclosed to the public in a press conference within a day of the shooting: How many shell casings were on the roof with the shooter? There’s no conceivable, legitimate reason why the government would want to hide this information. But here we are, nine days later, and the head of the Secret Service won’t tell us. She admits she knows the truth. But she’s defying a congressional subpoena and refusing to talk about it anyway.
The number of shell casings on the roof is a critical piece of information. It would obviously give us insight into how many times the shooter fired from that particular rooftop. If the number of shell casings doesn’t match the number of shots we can hear from footage of the rally, then there’s a major problem with the official narrative. It could mean that the crime scene was tampered with. Or it could mean that there was more than one shooter, beyond the one who’s already been identified.
If those possibilities sound outlandish, take a look at Cheatle’s response to this question from congressman Andy Biggs. He asks her point-blank whether the shooter was acting alone. Watch:
Again, this should not be a difficult question to answer. She could say, “Yes, it seems he was acting alone.” Or she could say “We think he had help.” Or she could say she’s genuinely not sure at this point. Instead, she refuses to provide any kind of answer whatsoever. She says she has no information she can provide, and that the congressman should talk to the FBI. And of course, the FBI won’t answer the question either. This is the kind of bureaucratic runaround you’d expect to get when you try to cancel your phone plan. And it’s how the federal government is handling the investigation into the most serious attempt on the life of a presidential candidate (and former president) in decades.
Again, it’s hard to conceive of any innocent reason why she would decline to answer these questions if the answers line up with the official narrative. It shouldn’t take anywhere near this long to have some answers to these questions, even if those answers are tentative. Think of how quickly the police charged Jennifer and James Crumbley with involuntary manslaughter. Those were the parents who allowed their son to access their handgun, which he then used to commit a school shooting. They were charged in less than a week. Why haven’t police charged the parents who allowed the Trump assassin to access their rifle? Have the authorities been looking at anyone else to charge who might have helped him? Why don’t we have any answers to any of these questions?
Right now, we’re learning more from investigators on social media than we are from the Secret Service. Yesterday, for example, the “Oversight Project” — part of the Heritage Foundation — took a look at databases of mobile advertising data. They found that: “Someone who regularly visited [the shooters’] home and work also visited a building in Washington, DC located in Gallery Place. This is in the same vicinity of an @FBI office on June 26, 2023.”
Who is that person who links the shooter’s home to an area in Washington, D.C. near a mall and an FBI field office? We have no idea. It could be nothing. It could be significant. But the more the Secret Service stonewalls on basic questions, the more people are entitled to come up with their own theories and conduct their own investigation. That piece of reporting from the Heritage Foundation — whether it pans out or not — is more believable than anything Kimberly Cheatle said yesterday. She spent 95% of the time dodging every question she was asked.
In fact, at several points, Cheatle simply lied under oath. She didn’t just filibuster, or give the typical bureaucratic runaround. She actually lied. For example, here’s her answer when she was asked about the Secret Service’s DEI hiring policies. Watch:
“Everyone who moves through the application process has to meet the same standards to become a special agent.” That’s what the Secret Service director said under oath.
It’s not remotely true. Anyone with Google can verify that it’s not true. Female trainees in the Secret Service have drastically lower fitness standards than male trainees. For example, the Secret Service considers it “excellent” if a 29 year-old male applicant can complete 55 or more pushups. They’ll get maximum points on their fitness test, which is critical for getting the job. But a 29-year-old female applicant receives the same “excellent” score if she can complete just 40 pushups. The cut-off for a “good” score for a 29-year-old male is 46 pushups, while a woman can achieve a “Good score” with just 26 pushups.
In other words, the director of the Secret Service lied under oath. There’s no conceivable way that she’s not aware of her agency’s hiring standards. To the extent Kimberly Cheatle has done anything during her tenure, she’s been pushing DEI hiring. She stated publicly that she wants 30 percent of the agency to be female. And she understands that one way to achieve that result is to have lower standards for women. But when she’s asked about this under oath, she just denies it outright. She knows no one’s going to come after her for perjury.
I could go through the rest of Cheatle’s testimony, which isn’t any better than what I’ve shown you. At one point, Cheatle admits that she still hasn’t even visited the shooting site in Butler. That’s how little she cares. She also refused to explain why no one was guarding the roof where the shooter was positioned — saying only that there was some kind of “overwatch” on the roof, which clearly didn’t work. Cheatle also admitted that somehow she doesn’t have a timeline of events from that day. This was one of the moments during her testimony when people in the room burst out laughing at how absurd it was. Watch:
“I have a timeline that does not have specifics.” So she just showed up and winged it basically. It’s like watching an actor who was told to play the head of the Secret Service for a day. If you found some random woman off the street, and told her to stonewall Congress about the assassination attempt, how would the results be any different than this?
Separately, Cheatle said she didn’t sign off on the security plan for the event because she doesn’t sign off for the security plans at any events. When asked for the name of the person who did sign off on the security plan for the Butler rally, she wouldn’t say. In fact, she implied that many people sign off on these plans, so no single person can be blamed. It’s a classic bureaucratic coverup. Cheatle also refused to talk about all the times that the Secret Service turned down the Trump campaign’s requests for additional security. And on and on.
But there’s one more clip that is very important to see. It’s AOC going after Kimberly Cheatle. Online, a lot of people on the Right are praising AOC for this performance. But along with Mike Cernovich, I think it reveals something a lot more troubling than it appears. Watch:
AOC wasn’t the only Democrat to rip into Cheatle like this. Several Democrats did the same thing. And there’s two possible interpretations for that. One is that the security failures were so bad that Democrats are putting aside politics for the first time in modern history. They’re just as outraged as Trump supporters.
The other interpretation, however, is that whenever AOC agrees with the entire Republican caucus, we should take a step back and think about what’s going on. Maybe Kimberly Cheatle was sent out there to testify in order to serve as a sacrificial lamb. Maybe the point of this hearing was for both Democrats and Republicans to beat her up like a piñata. And then, when she inevitably resigns, members of both parties will feel like justice has been done. The problem has been solved. A replaceable cog in the bureaucratic machine has been removed. The implication would be: No need to look higher. No need to investigate any other connections this shooter may have had with the government. The problem is taken care of. And that seems to be exactly what happened. They knew they were going to force her resignation. But they had her testify to congress first. That way she could stonewall, absorb all the blame, and then leave. Now they can put someone else in charge of the agency who will not have to answer any questions at all.
That can’t be the end of it, though. For lack of a better word, these are very strange times right now in this country. It’s not even clear who’s running the federal government. We don’t know who has the authority to fire Kimberly Cheatle. The president of the United States is technically her boss. But he hasn’t been seen in public for several days. He allegedly just phoned into a rally for Kamala Harris, but no one could see his face. After weeks of insisting he’s not dropping out of the race, now he’s suddenly issuing full-throated endorsements for his running mate. Meanwhile the president’s brother is suggesting Biden doesn’t have long to live. And the press is pretending this is all completely normal.
But none of this is normal. We still don’t understand what just happened to Joe Biden. And from Kimberly Cheatle’s testimony, it looks like we may never know what happened in Butler, either. At the very least, the government won’t tell us. It’s hard to think of a stronger argument for completely dismantling the federal government bureaucracy if and when Donald Trump gets back into office. Even assuming they’re not actively trying to sabotage this country — which is quite an assumption at this point — then at the very least, these bureaucrats so incompetent that they’re destroying any faith that Americans have in the proper functioning of their government.
Mediocre men and women like Kimberly Cheatle are leading pretty much every federal agency in this country. And just like Joe Biden, these bureaucrats can’t be reasoned with. They can’t be shamed. They won’t go anywhere unless they’re forced to.
“}]]
