The director of the US Secret Service, Kimberly Cheatle, has resigned, a day after admitting that the agency failed in its mission to prevent an assassination attempt against Donald Trump, AFP reported.
Cheatle faced bipartisan calls to step down after a 20-year-old gunman wounded the former Republican president and current White House candidate at a campaign rally on July 13 in Butler, Pennsylvania.
"It's overdue, she should have done it at least a week ago," said Mike Johnson, the Republican speaker of the House of Representatives.
"I'm happy to see that she heeded the call of both Republicans and Democrats," he added.
A day earlier, Cheatle appeared before a congressional committee and said the attack on Trump, who was wounded in the right ear, was a failure of the Secret Service.
She called it "the most significant Secret Service operational failure in decades."
Both Republicans and Democrats have called for Cheatle to resign. She drew the ire of lawmakers from both parties by refusing to provide specific details about the attack, citing multiple active investigations.
The gunman opened fire on Trump with an AR assault rifle just minutes after he began speaking at a campaign event.
Perched on the roof of a nearby building, he was shot by a Secret Service sniper less than 30 seconds after firing the first of eight shots.
Investigators concluded that the young man, who lived in a town about 50 miles from Butler, acted alone, and were unable to establish any strong ideological or political bias.
Two rally participants were seriously injured, and a 50-year-old firefighter from Pennsylvania was shot.
Trump's former doctor said over the weekend that the Republican nominee suffered a two-centimetre gunshot wound to his right ear.
"The bullet went through, coming less than a quarter of an inch from entering his head, and struck the top of his right ear," former White House physician Ronny Jackson said.
Cheatle served as a Secret Service agent for 27 years before leaving in 2021 to become head of North American security for PepsiCo.
In 2022, she was appointed to head the agency by President Joe Biden. | BGNES
