Ranking member Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) joined calls demanding the resignation of Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle at the close of Monday’s House Oversight and Accountability Committee.
“I don’t want to add to the director’s terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day, 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,” Raskin said.
“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.”
Shortly after the hearing ended, Raskin, along with Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) sent a joint letter to Cheatle asking her to resign.
“Today, you failed to provide answers to basic questions regarding that stunning operational failure and to reassure the American people that the Secret Service has learned its lessons and begun to correct its systemic blunders and failures. In the middle of a presidential election, the Committee and the American people demand serious institutional accountability and transparency that you are not providing,” they wrote in a rare joint letter.
“We call on you to resign as Director as a first step to allowing new leadership to swiftly address this crisis and rebuild the trust of a truly concerned Congress and the American people.”
The call from Raskin adds to the growing number of Democrats demanding Cheatle resign – numbers that grew over the course of a disastrous four-hour hearing.
Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) and Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-Fla.) also called for Cheatle’s resignation during the hearing, joining Rep. Brendan Boyle (D-Pa.), who was the first Democrat to make that demand over the weekend.
“I just don’t think this is partisan — if you have an assassination attempt on a president, a former president or a candidate, you need to resign,” Khanna said during questioning of Cheatle.
“You cannot go leading a Secret Service agency when there is an assassination attempt on a presidential candidate.”
Raskin added that he blamed Congress in addition to the Secret Service, faulting lawmakers for failing to address access to high-powered weapons and gun violence in general.
“The president, the former president and a handful of people who get the Secret Service protection are the only people in America we thought were safe from an AR-15 attack. It’s clear that they’re not safe, either. And we’ve got to get to the bottom of that,” he said.
“But we also have to get to the bottom of the larger problem, which is that the whole country is living like this — in fear and in terror of assault weapon attacks,” he added.
This story was updated at 3:56 p.m.