Speaker Johnson says he's looking at options if Secret Service director doesn’t resign
MILWAUKEE — Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) on Wednesday said he is assessing all courses of action for a potential situation in which U.S. Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle refuses to resign despite calls for her to step aside after this weekend’s shooting at former President Trump’s rally.
Johnson on Wednesday joined calls for Cheatle to resign after the shooting at Trump’s rally in Butler, Pa., which left the former president bloodied after a bullet grazed his ear. One rallygoer was killed.
Cheatle, however, told ABC News’s Pierre Thomas in an interview that aired Monday that she does not plan to resign, saying “I do plan to stay on.”
During an interview with The Hill on Wednesday, Johnson said he is considering all options in the event that Cheatle remains defiant and refuses to relinquish her position.
“We’re looking at all those options right now,” Johnson said when asked if Congress has any recourse, and if that includes impeachment.
“But the first thing is to stand up the task force to get down to the real facts,” he continued. “And we’ll be doing that in earnest and announced that this morning, we’re working on it today.”
The comments come after Johnson earlier Wednesday said Cheatle should step down and announced that he would create a congressional task force to streamline the investigations into the security failure surrounding the shooting.
“I’m going to call for resignation as well,” Johnson said on Fox News. “I think it’s inexcusable.”
“We’re gonna move quickly. I’ll be setting up on Monday a task force, a special task force within the House, and the reason we’re going to do it that way is because that is a more of a precision strike,” he said at another point in the interview. “It goes quicker, there’s not a lot of procedural hurdles and we’ll have subpoena authority for that task force as well. It’ll be compiled of Republicans and Democrats to get down to the bottom of this quickly so the American people can get the answers that they deserve.”
At least six committees on Capitol Hill are looking into the assassination attempt on Trump over the weekend, most of which are zeroing in on the Secret Service and the Department of Homeland Security.