United Sates Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle testifies before the House Oversight and Accountability Committee during a hearing at the Rayburn House Office Building on July 22, 2024 in Washington, DC.
Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle has finally announced she will step down after being roundly slammed by a bipartisan committee during a congressional hearing for her failure to prevent the assassination attempt on Donald Trump.
U.S. Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle has stepped down amid resounding, bipartisan calls for her resignation by congressmen following the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump.
Three sources confirmed to NBC that Cheatle officially resigned on Tuesday morning. In her letter of resignation, shared by a senior official, Cheatle wrote that she takes “full responsibility for the security lapse.”
“In light of recent events, it is with a heavy heart that I have made the difficult decision to step down as your Director,” she wrote.
President Joe Biden said in a statement following Cheatle’s announcement of her resignation that he will appoint a new head of Secret Service “soon.” He has ordered an “independent review” to investigate the day’s events.
In response to Cheatle’s resignation, Trump wrote on Truth Social: “The Biden/Harris Administration did not properly protect me, and I was forced to take a bullet for Democracy. IT WAS MY GREAT HONOR TO DO SO!”
Her decision comes a day after being grilled under subpoena by Republican and Democrat members of the House Oversight Committee, who ripped her both for the grave Secret Service lapse that allowed Trump to be shot and for her refusal to answer simple questions during the hearing.
The leading Democrat member of the panel, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), accused Cheatle of having “lost the confidence of Congress at a very urgent and tender moment in the history of the country.”
Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) slammed Cheatle as “full of s***” and “completely dishonest” for not giving direct answers to questions, including about providing “audio and video recordings” in her possession that were taken the day of the Trump assassination attempt.
“How did a 20-year-old loner with a week’s notice pick the absolute best location to assassinate President Trump when the entire Secret Service missed it?” asked Rep. Pat Fallon, R-Texas. “Director Cheatle, on your leadership, your agency got outsmarted and outmaneuvered by a 20-year-old. How can we have any confidence that you could stop trained professionals from a nefarious nation state?”
The Secret Service director was unable to provide explanations as to why the roof used by Crooks to shoot at Trump was not secured the day of the shooting and why Trump was allowed to speak on stage while the Secret Service was aware that a suspicious man was present on the grounds that day. At one point, she claimed she did not “have the timeline of how the individual accessed the roof, where they accessed the roof, or how long they were on the roof.”
She said, however, that all the security resources requested “for that day” were provided.
Cheatle resisted calls to resign prior to Tuesday, with a Secret Service spokesperson declaring last week that she had no intention to resign even after mounting calls for her to step down.
Critics across the board have described the security breach at Trump’s Pennsylvania campaign rally as a “catastrophic failure” of the Secret Service. Video footage emerged online of attendees from the Trump rally alerting police to the gunman, 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, positioned on a roof toward the rally stage, highlighting one of many security failures that day to prevent the assassination attempt. One man present that day told the BBC he was “pointing” at the gunman on the roof for two or three minutes.
Counter-snipers fatally shot Crooks after one of his shots grazed the former president’s right ear, bloodying him. However, Crooks killed a rally attendee, identified as 50-year old Corey Comperatore, a former fire chief. Two other Pennsylvania residents were shot, but are reportedly in stable condition.
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Anthony “I represent science” Fauci can now stand beside Richard “I am not a crook” Nixon in the history books as someone who received the poison pill of a preemptive pardon.
While Nixon was pardoned for specific charges related to Watergate, the exact crimes for which Fauci was pardoned are not specified. Rather, the pardon specifies:
Baseless and politically motivated investigations wreak havoc on the lives, safety, and financial security of targeted individuals and their families. Even when individuals have done nothing wrong – and in fact have done the right things – and will ultimately be exonerated, the mere fact of being investigated and prosecuted can irreparably damage reputations and finances.
In other words, the dying breath of the Biden administration appears to be pardoning Fauci for crimes he didn’t commit, which would seem to make a pardon null and void. The pardon goes further than simply granting clemency for crimes. Clemency usually alleviates the punishment associated with a crime, but here Biden attempts to alleviate the burden of investigations and prosecutions, the likes of which our justice system uses to uncover crimes.
It’s one thing to pardon someone who has been subjected to a fair trial and convicted, to say they have already paid their dues. Gerald Ford, in his pardon of Richard Nixon, admitted that Nixon had already paid the high cost of resigning from the highest office in the land. Nixon’s resignation came as the final chapter of prolonged investigations into his illegal and unpresidential conduct during Watergate, and those investigations provided us the truth we needed to know that Nixon was a crook and move on content that his ignominious reputation was carve d into stone for all of history.
Fauci, meanwhile, has evaded investigations on matters far more serious than Watergate. In 2017, DARPA organized a grant call – the PREEMPT call – aiming to preempt pathogen spillover from wildlife to people. In 2018 a newly formed collaborative group of scientists from the US, Singapore, and Wuhan wrote a grant – the DEFUSE grant – proposing to modify a bat sarbecovirus in Wuhan in a very unusual way. DARPA did not fund the team because their work was too risky for the Department of Defense, but in 2019 Fauci’s NIAID funded this exact set of scientists who never wrote a paper together prior or since. In late 2019, SARS-CoV-2 emerged in Wuhan with the precise modifications proposed in the DEFUSE grant submitted to PREEMPT.
It’s reasonable to be concerned that this line of research funded by Fauci’s NIAID may have caused the pandemic. In fact, if we’re sharp-penciled and honest with our probabilities, it’s likely beyond reasonable doubt that SARS-CoV-2 emerged as a consequence of research proposed in DEFUSE. What we don’t know, however, is whether the research proceeded with US involvement or not.
Congress used its constitutionally-granted investigation and oversight responsibilities to investigate and oversee NIAID in search of answers. In the process of these investigations, they found endless pages of emails with unjustified redactions, evidence that Fauci’s FOIA lady could “make emails disappear,” Fauci’s right-hand-man David Morens aided the DEFUSE authors as they navigated disciplinary measures at NIH and NIAID, and there were significant concerns that NIAID sought to obstruct investigations and destroy federal records.
Such obstructive actions did not inspire confidence in the innocence of Anthony Fauci or the US scientists he funded in 2019. On the contrary, Fauci testified twice under oath saying NIAID did not fund gain-of-function research of concern in Wuhan…but then we discovered a 2018 progress report of research NIAID funded in Wuhan revealing research they funded had enhanced the transmissibility of a bat SARS-related coronavirus 10,000 times higher than the wild virus. That is, indisputably, gain-of-function research of concern. Fauci thus lied to the American public and perjured himself in his testimony to Congress, and Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) has referred Fauci’s perjury charges to the Department of Justice.
What was NIAID trying to preempt with their obstruction of Congressional investigations? What is Biden trying to preempt with his pardon of Fauci? Why do we not have the 2019 NIAID progress report from the PI’s who submitted DEFUSE to PREEMPT and later received funding from NIAID?
It is deplorable for Biden to preemptively pardon Fauci on his last day in office, with so little known about the research NIAID funded in 2019 and voters so clearly eager to learn more. With Nixon’s preemptive pardon, the truth of his wrongdoing was known and all that was left was punishment. With Fauci’s preemptive pardon, the truth is not yet known, NIAID officials in Fauci’s orbit violated federal records laws in their effort to avoid the truth from being known, and Biden didn’t preemptively pardon Fauci to grant clemency and alleviate punishment, but to stop investigations and prosecutions the likes of which could uncover the truth.
I’m not a Constitutional scholar prepared to argue the legality of this maneuver, but I am an ethical human being, a scientist who contributed another grant to the PREEMPT call, and a scientist who helped uncover some of the evidence consistent with a lab origin and quantify the likelihood of a lab origin from research proposed in the DEFUSE grant. Any ethical human being knows that we need to know what caused the pandemic, and to deprive the citizenry of such information from open investigations of NIAID research in 2019 would be to deprive us of critical information we need to self-govern and elect people who manage scientific risks in ways we see fit. As a scientist, there are critical questions about bioattribution that require testing, and the way to test our hypotheses is to uncover the redacted and withheld documents from Fauci’s NIAID in 2019.
The Biden administration’s dying breath was to pardon Anthony Fauci not for the convictions for crimes he didn’t commit (?) but to avoid investigations that could be a reputational and financial burden for Anthony Fauci. A pardon to preempt an investigation is not a pardon; it is obstruction. The Biden administration’s dying breath is to obstruct our pursuit of truth and reconciliation on the ultimate cause of 1 million Americans’ dying breaths.
To remind everyone what we still need to know, it helps to look through the peephole of what we’ve already found to inspire curiosity about what else we’d find if only the peephole could be widened. Below is one of the precious few emails investigative journalists pursuing FOIAs against NIAID have managed to obtain from the critical period when SARS-CoV-2 is believed to have emerged. The email connects DEFUSE PI’s Peter Daszak (EcoHealth Alliance), Ralph Baric (UNC), Linfa Wang (Duke-NUS), Ben Hu (Wuhan Institute of Virology), Shi ZhengLi (Wuhan Institute of Virology) and others in October 2019. The subject line “NIAID SARS-CoV Call – October 30/31” connects these authors to NIAID.
It is approximately in that time range – October/November 2019 – when SARS-CoV-2 is hypothesized to have entered the human population in Wuhan. When it emerged, SARS-CoV-2 was unique among sarbecoviruses in having a furin cleavage site, as proposed by these authors in their 2019 DEFUSE grant. Of all the places the furin cleavage site could be, the furin cleavage site of SARS-CoV-2 was in the S1/S2 junction of the Spike protein, precisely as proposed by these authors.
The virus did not emerge in Bangkok, Hanoi, Bago, Kunming, Guangdong, or any of the myriad other places with similar animal trade networks and greater contact rates between people and sarbecovirus reservoirs. No. The virus emerged in Wuhan, the exact place and time one would expect from DEFUSE.
With all the evidence pointing the hounds towards NIAID, it is essential for global health security that we further investigate the research NIAID funded in 2019. It is imperative for our constitutional democracy, for our ability to self-govern, that we learn the truth. The only way to learn the truth is to investigate NIAID, the agency Fauci led for 38 years, the agency that funded gain-of-function research of concern, the agency named in the October 2019 call by DEFUSE PI’s, the agency that funded this exact group in 2019.
A preemptive pardon prior to the discovery of truth is a fancy name for obstruction of justice. The Biden administration’s dying breath must be challenged, and we must allow Congress and the incoming administration to investigate the possibility that Anthony Fauci’s NIAID-supported research caused the Covid-19 pandemic.
Alex Washburne is a mathematical biologist and the founder and chief scientist at Selva Analytics. He studies competition in ecological, epidemiological, and economic systems research, with research on covid epidemiology, the economic impacts of pandemic policy, and stock market response to epidemiological news.
Group files suit over DOGE secrecy on Trump’s first day
President Donald Trump promised Americans that their federal government would operate more efficiently with the creation of the Department of Government Efficiency.
“My administration will establish the brand new Department of Government Efficiency,” the 47th president said to applause from Republicans.
Trump’s remarks on DOGE came the same day as a nonprofit group joined a union to file suit over the outside agency, alleging its secret meetings violate federal law.
The complaint, filed by Public Citizen and the American Federation of Government Employees, alleges DOGE violates the Federal Advisory Committee Act because “members do not have a fair balance of viewpoints, meetings are held in secret and without public notice and records and work product are not available to the public.”
“AFGE will not stand idly by as a secretive group of ultra-wealthy individuals with major conflicts of interest attempt to deregulate themselves and give their own companies sweetheart government contracts while firing civil servants and dismantling the institutions designed to serve the American people,” AFGE National President Everett Kelley said in a statement. “This fight is about fairness, accountability, and the integrity of our government.”
Trump spoke about DOGE during his inauguration after making bold promises for the department after winning the 2024 election.
Trump picked Tesla CEO Elon Musk and businessman Vivek Ramaswamy to lead DOGE. Trump said the new group will pave the way for his administration to “dismantle government bureaucracy, slash excess regulation, cut wasteful expenditures and restructure federal agencies.”
Both Musk and Ramaswamy attended Trump’s inauguration Monday. The two men previously outlined their plans for DOGE, which includes reducing regulations that would lead to mass layoffs of federal employees.
“A drastic reduction in federal regulations provides sound industrial logic for mass head-count reductions across the federal bureaucracy,” Musk and Ramaswamy wrote in an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal in November. “DOGE intends to work with embedded appointees in agencies to identify the minimum number of employees required at an agency for it to perform its constitutionally permissible and statutorily mandated functions.”
AFGE, which represents more than 800,000 workers in nearly every federal agency, had previously denounced DOGE. Kelley said it will hollow out the federal government and its workforce.
“By their very nature, cuts of this size also would require slashing spending on our military, homeland security, federal law enforcement, and virtually every aspect of our government operations,” he said. “This kind of financial pressure would lead to painful, widespread reductions in services that will affect Americans from every walk of life.”
Trump has promised to cut “hundreds of billions” in federal spending in 2025 through the reconciliation process. DOGE co-leader Musk initially suggested DOGE could cut $2 trillion in spending. Musk more recently said the group will aim for $2 trillion, but likely come up with half that amount.
Congress controls the purse strings for discretionary spending, which totaled about $1.7 trillion in 2023. Congress generally allocates about half of its discretionary spending to the U.S. Department of Defense.
“The number of federal employees to cut should be at least proportionate to the number of federal regulations that are nullified: Not only are fewer employees required to enforce fewer regulations, but the agency would produce fewer regulations once its scope of authority is properly limited,” Musk and Ramaswamy wrote. “Employees whose positions are eliminated deserve to be treated with respect, and DOGE’s goal is to help support their transition into the private sector. The president can use existing laws to give them incentives for early retirement and to make voluntary severance payments to facilitate a graceful exit.”
Congress has run a deficit every year since 2001. In the past 50 years, the federal government has ended with a fiscal year-end budget surplus four times, most recently in 2001.
Last week, the federal government reported net costs of $7.4 trillion in fiscal year 2024, but it couldn’t fully account for its spending. The U.S. Government Accountability Office, which is Congress’s research arm, said that the federal government must address “serious deficiencies” in federal financial management and correct course on its “unsustainable” long-term fiscal path.
