Biden announces new head of Secret Service

President Joe Biden has appointed Kimberly Cheatle to be the next director of the Secret Service.

Biden on Wednesday called Cheatle “a distinguished law enforcement professional with exceptional leadership skills,” saying in a statement that she “was easily the best choice to lead the agency at a critical moment for the Secret Service.” In this new role, she will become the second woman to lead the Secret Service, after former President Barack Obama appointed Julia Pierson as the first in 2013.

Cheatle will be taking over at an agency facing a number of issues. On July 13, Congress was notified by Homeland Security’s inspector general that the Secret Service had lost texts related to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol while erasing employees’ phones as part of a new protocol. The House select committee investigating the attack then subpoenaed the agency for its records, concerned that federal records laws could have been violated if the messages weren’t preserved.

DHS Inspector General Joseph Cuffari seemed to push back against the increased scrutiny. POLITICO reported at the beginning of August that Cuffari wrote in a work email that “because of the U.S. Attorney General guidelines and quality standards, we cannot always publicly respond to untruths and false information about our work.” He continued: “I am so proud of the resilience I have witnessed in the face of this onslaught of meritless criticism.”

Shortly after, the chair of Jan. 6 committee, Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), and Oversight chair Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) sent a letter saying they had documents that “raise troubling new concerns that your office not only failed to notify Congress for more than a year that critical evidence in this investigation was missing, but your senior staff deliberately chose not to pursue that evidence and then appear to have taken steps to cover up these failures.”

Tackling these problems will be part of the next phase of Cheatle’s 25-year-plus career with the Secret Service. She has served numerous leadership roles within the agency, including becoming the first woman to serve in the role of assistant director of protective operations, in October 2019.

Biden “came to trust her judgment and counsel” when she was on his security detail as vice president, he said in his statement. In 2021, Biden awarded her a Presidential Rank Award, “recognizing her among a select group of career members of the Senior Executive Service for exceptional performance over an extended period of time.”

Cheatle is currently a senior director at PepsiCo North America, where she oversees facilities, personnel and business continuity.