Biden's DEI Secret Service Director
By Hans Mahncke & Jeff Carlson
Up until the attempted assassination of President Donald Trump on Saturday, July 13, most people had never heard of Kimberly Cheatle. She is the director of the Secret Service. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Joe Biden still doesn’t know who Cheatle is, confusing her with a man in an NBC interview that was recorded on Monday.
As director of the Secret Service, Cheatle is ultimately responsible for the complete failure of the security supposedly provided by the Secret Service before, during, and after the attempted assassination. How could the Secret Service have failed to secure a rooftop located within 400 feet of Trump? Was it due to incompetence or something more sinister?
While various conspiracy theories have spawned, and while many facts remain shrouded in mystery, such as the shooter’s alleged lack of any social media presence, a closer examination of Cheatle’s history, focus, and a statement made after the assassination attempt suggest that this was a case of gross incompetence. The incompetence not only made catastrophic events entirely foreseeable, but they had, in fact, been foreseen.
Kimberly Cheatle is not your typical Secret Service director appointee. This is not because she is a woman. In reality, she is not the first woman to serve in that role. Julia Pierson, an appointee under Obama, held that position previously. It is worth noting that Obama did not highlight the DEI (Diversity, Equity & Inclusion) aspects of Pierson's appointment. His announcement did not reference the term 'woman', 'first', DEI, or any related concepts.
So you might have thought that the fact that Cheatle wasn’t the first female director of the Secret Service meant Biden couldn’t virtue signal about DEI when he appointed her. After all, the title of the first female director was no longer available. However, that didn’t deter Biden or his handlers. The very first paragraph of Biden’s announcement of Cheatle’s appointment emphasized that she was “the first woman in the role of Assistant Director of Protective Operations,” as if that was something amazingly noteworthy.
But Biden’s excessively indulgent penchant for virtue signaling over DEI is just one aspect of how we ended up in this predicament. The other part of the story involves good old-fashioned cronyism, Biden style. Cheatle is not merely a long-serving Secret Service employee who worked her way up to director. She actually served on “Dr” Jill and Joe Biden’s security team during Joe's Vice Presidency. This prior connection explains their familiarity. One might argue that they trusted her based on their past relationship and thus decided to promote her.
Well, the story might not be so bad if it was just that. But the situation is more complex. Incredibly, Cheatle was no longer with the Secret Service when the Bidens selected her as director. Cheatle had left the Secret Service for a lucrative position at PepsiCo (it was this gig that prompted Elon Musk to sarcastically tweet that she was guarding bags of Cheetos). To put it more bluntly, the Bidens, apparently at the behest of “Dr” Jill, overlooked members of the Secret Service who were actually in the Secret Service, and instead decided to parachute in an old acquaintance for the position of director.
Why would they have done that? Cronyism is no doubt part of the equation, but it wasn’t just cronyism for the sake of cronyism. What was perhaps most important to the Bidens was that they could rely on Cheatle to keep her mouth shut, and the mouths of those working for her. When the Bidens' German Shepherd bit Secret Service agents on at least 24 occasions, the incidents were covered up. We don’t know what else might have been covered up in the past few years because, as Donald Rumsfeld might have said, those are unknown unknowns.
There are, however, some known knowns. Firstly, it is a fact that, under her leadership, the Secret Service has transformed into a hub for DEI enthusiasts. In a 2023 interview with CBS, Cheatle declared her plan to enhance diversity within the Secret Service, aiming to achieve a 30% representation of women recruits by 2030.
While this may generally be a commendable goal, it should be obvious to anyone with a functioning brain that the Secret Service isn’t a suitable playground for DEI games. The image of that female agent fumbling around with her gun in the aftermath of the Trump shooting has already embedded itself into the national conscience. But even if we leave that aside – after all, there are many highly accomplished female law enforcement officers – the simple fact that 5-foot-3 women were guarding a 6-foot-3 man doesn’t pass the sanity test.
There is also the incident from just over two months ago in which Michelle Herczeg, a female Secret Service agent assigned to Vice President Kamala Harris’ security detail, is reported to have gone berserk on the job. A former colleague of Herczeg’s told the New York Post that they were “gobsmacked that Herczeg was picked for the vice president’s detail as in their experience, she was not the type of person suited to law enforcement”. The colleague added: “I wouldn’t have allowed this person to supervise my dog, much less the vice president (...) Somebody dropped the ball on this one.” Notably, these statements were not made in the aftermath of the Trump shooting. They were made two months ago. The warning signs about the Secret Service going astray were there, but they weren’t heeded.
Secondly, the relentless emphasis on DEI has shifted focus away from the Secret Service's primary responsibilities. One of these responsibilities was to guarantee President Trump's safety; however, it seems that no one took the initiative to secure an adjacent building that had a clear line of sight to the president. It’s as if all the lessons of Dallas had to make way for DEI indoctrination. As Jennifer Jacobs of Bloomberg reported in May, at least 39 Secret Service agents “flagged concerns about a number of recent Secret Service incidents indicative of inadequate training, a double standard in disciplinary actions, and a vulnerability to potential insider threats that could pose a risk to US national security.” Again, the warning signs were there.
Which brings us to the third point, which is incompetence bordering on the ludicrous. In an interview with ABC on Tuesday, Cheatle explained the Secret Service’s failure to secure the roof from which Trump was shot by blaming the sloped roof: “That building in particular has a sloped roof at its highest point. And so, you know, there's a safety factor that would be considered there that we wouldn't want to put somebody up on a sloped roof.”
President Trump did not survive the assassination attempt because of the Secret Service. He survived it despite the Secret Service.