Pressure on the Secret Service mounts as investigation continues

A group of Republican senators confronted Cheatle at the convention, demanding more answers about the shooting at the Trump rally. Cheatle continued walking while they shouted questions at her.

Later, in an interview with NBC News’ Kristen Welker, Senator Kevin Cramer of North Dakota criticized Cheatle’s “hostility” toward senators and called on her to resign.

An investigation into Trump rally shooter Thomas Crooks’ online search history found that people had searched for images of Trump and Biden, a person said in a conference call with officials.

The search history also included data from Trump’s appearances and the Democratic Party convention scheduled to take place in Chicago, the person said.

The targeted internet searches on Trump, a rally and the Democratic Party convention took place this month, a senior US police official said.

The Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General today announced a third investigation into the Secret Service following the attack.

The regulator said it had initiated a review of “the USSS’s planning and implementation activities for protection operations.”

“Our goal is to determine the extent to which the Secret Service plans and implements protective measures to ensure the safety of designated protected individuals,” the office said in a statement.

The company had previously announced two further investigations: one into the preparations for the Trump rally on Saturday in Butler, Pennsylvania, and a second into the operations of the Secret Service’s sniper counterintelligence team.

Despite growing calls for Cheatle to resign, she has no plans to do so, the Secret Service’s communications chief said today.

“Continuity of operations is paramount during a critical incident and U.S. Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle has no intention of resigning,” Anthony Guglielmi said in a statement.

“She has great respect for Members of Congress and is fiercely committed to transparency as she leads the Secret Service through internal investigations and strengthens the agency through the lessons learned from these important internal and external reviews,” he said.

Cheatle spoke this week with Jim Pasco, executive director of the Fraternal Order of Police, which represents more than 373,000 members, including Secret Service and Pennsylvania State Police agents.

Cheatle called in Tuesday in response to the FOP’s statement, criticizing their comments as contradictory and saying they had wrongly blamed local police for failing to secure the building from which Crooks fired shots.

After the conversation, Cheatle and the Secret Service changed their statements, saying that local police were not in the building but in an adjacent building. They reiterated that the responsibility for securing the building ultimately rested with the Secret Service.

Pasco spoke exclusively to NBC News about the call and said that Cheatle ultimately agreed that local police were not to blame.

“It was an open exchange, but in the end we agreed that local police departments should not play a role in the development and implementation of the plan unless the Secret Service requests it,” Pasco said.

A member of the church that Comperatore regularly attended said she and her husband were attending a service at Cabot Church in Cabot, Pennsylvania, on Saturday night when the shooting happened.

“Our message was about God in the darkness and God being there even in tragic situations,” said 28-year-old Ciara DeWalt. “And instead of asking, ‘Why, God, why are you doing this?’ it was about trusting that God knows the bigger picture.”

She said she and her husband wondered on the way home if they knew the shooter.

“Never in our lives did we think we would know the people who were killed or victims,” she said.

DeWalt said the worst part was seeing the conspiracy theories posted on the Internet.

“It’s one of those things where you think, ‘Oh, that’s never happening,’ and then of course there are people who doubt the authenticity of it, which I understand. There are a lot of questions that need to be answered, but the trauma and the authenticity of what the family is going through is not faked.

“And I think that’s the most frustrating part: people say it was staged and he’s not really dead. And all of this while at the same time you have to watch your own community suffer and go through this together.”

Senator John Cornyn (R-Texas) posted on social media today that Cheatle must resign following the security failures at the rally. He also said Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee have asked Chairman Dick Durbin (D-Illinois) to hold a hearing on the matter “so we can finally give the American people answers about how this happened.”

NBC News Homeland Security Correspondent Julia Ainsley joined Meet the Press NOW to report on a Department of Homeland Security investigation into the Secret Service’s handling of the threat posed by the gunman at the rally.

The Secret Service communications chief said Crooks was “never identified as a threat.”

NBC News reported last night that Crooks was reported as a suspect an hour before the shooting, according to three sources familiar with a briefing for senators.

Secret Service spokesman Anthony Guglielmi told NBC News last night that Crooks had instead been classified as a “suspicious person,” meaning there was no evidence he posed a threat but that further investigation into him was necessary.

“It is not correct to say that we were aware of the threat before we identified him as a threat, that is, when he was neutralized,” he said in an interview.

“We were notified of a suspicious person who may have been carrying a backpack and a golf rangefinder. There is a big difference between a threat and a suspicious person,” he said.

In the days after a gunman nearly killed Trump, the Secret Service’s attention focused on inadequate security on the roof where the gunman had taken up a sniper position.

But what happened after a bullet struck Trump’s ear was equally infuriating, according to former Secret Service agents and celebrity protection experts. While Trump’s special forces were on the move and quickly rushed to him when the bullets started flying, the agents’ actions immediately afterward violated the most basic protocols – and they needlessly put Trump’s life in danger.

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