Trump ally Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) pounced on Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle during a hearing on Capitol Hill Monday afternoon over the agency's failure to prevent an assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump.
“You’re full of shit today,” Mace bluntly told the agency chief, after trying to buttonhole her on a series of yes-or-no questions.
“Would you like to use my five minutes to draft your resignation letter? Yes, or no?” Mace had said earlier in her questioning.
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In a show of bipartisanship rarely seen in Congress these days, the chairman of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, Rep. James Comer (R-KY) and the panel's top Democrat, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), both called on Cheatle to resign over the agency's security lapse surrounding the failed assassination bid. Others followed suit.
Raskin lamented Cheatle's "extraordinary communications gap" with Congress as she repeatedly dodged questions about the agency's security failure.
"I don't want to add to the director's terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day," Raskin said, "but I will be joining the chairman in calling for the resignation of the director, just because I think that this relationship is irretrievable at this point and I think that the director has lost the confidence of Congress at a very urgent and tender moment in the history of the country, and we need to very quickly move beyond this."
Mace (who knows how to get media attention—and prioritizes it, as the Daily Beast reported from an exclusively obtained staff handbook in November) did land a key concession out of Cheatle amid her questioning.
“Was this a colossal failure?” the South Carolina congresswoman asked of the assassination attempt, which occurred during a rally Trump held in Butler, Pennsylvania on July 13, in a particularly pointed question.
“It was a failure,” Cheatle replied.
“Yes or no, was it a colossal failure is the question,” Mace bit back.
“I have admitted this is a terrible—” Cheatle said in an attempt to respond before Mace cut her off. Eventually, she simply said “yes.”
Mace then began tearing into Cheatle over the opening statement she gave in the hearing, which had leaked to the press.
“I have no idea how my statement got out,” the agency chief claimed.
“Well,” Mace said, “that’s bullshit.”
After Mace went on to call Cheatle “full of shit,” fellow members on the Oversight committee groaned and called a point of order to, as Rep. Kweisi Mfume (D-MD) put it, “maintain decorum in this committee, no matter how upset we get.”
