The director of the Secret Service, Kimberly A. Cheatle, resigned on Tuesday, after security failures surrounding the attempted assassination of former President Donald J. Trump and calls for her to step down from prominent Republican lawmakers.

In an email to Secret Service employees on Tuesday, Ms. Cheatle said that one of the Secret Service’s foremost duties is to protect the nation’s leaders and that the agency “fell short of that mission” in failing to secure a campaign rally from a gunman on July 13.

“I do not want my calls for resignation to be a distraction from the great work each and every one of you do towards our vital mission,” Ms. Cheatle said in the email, which was reviewed by The New York Times.

She said she was deeply committed to the agency but added that, “in light of recent events, it is with a heavy heart that I have made the difficult decision to step down as your director.”

Oh, blech. This is the worst director of the Secret Service in its history. Her biggest priority wasn't effective service, it was DEI, complete with female Agents who didn't appear well trained, as well as making Jill Biden happy whenever she wanted to address a kaffee klatsch of a hundred old biddies at the expense of her charges who really did need security in front of 55,000 people and by law were entitled to it.

The assassination attempt against President Trump 10 days ago made that pretty clear -- the president was left completely unprotected and had to duck and cover by himself as bullets flew, several seconds before Secret Service protection kicked in.

What's more, it was completely preventable, had the perimeter of the event been secured properly, without a PAC-Man-style bite cut out of it where the gunman took up his perch, climbing over a building full of cops with a ladder he bought and big rifle, and then fired away, a half hour after the Secret Service was aware of his presence, its meager three agents on the outer rings of protection ignoring the screams and pleas of bystanders.

The breaches were amazing.  The Secret Service missed the check-in security briefing with the other law enforcement agencies it had dispatched to cover some of the missing coverage. The lawmen dispatched to cover the roof went inside because it was too hot outside. An encounter by one lawman with the wannabe assassin who had a gun pointed at him and escaped didn't seem to be reported up the chain of command.

The cover-up, stonewalling, and outright lies, coming from Cheatle, were even worse.

Cheatle refused to disclose to Congress who approved the failed security plan and who was giving orders as rooftop snipers held fire. She first denied, then confirmed that the Trump team had asked for additional Secret Service resources which had been refused, claiming it all was adequate. Cheatle declined to tell Congress how many bullet casings were found, which could have indicated more than one gunman. She made the ridiculous claim in earlier congressional testimony about not wanting to stage Secret Service Agents on the roof which she claimed was "sloped," and thus, too dangerous, like she was makin' it up as she went along, and later said that other posts were watching. (No kidding, they watched for a half hour before the attempt.) Meanwhile, radio recordings showing who was directing this were somehow "lost." She wouldn't say how many resources were redirected to Jill Biden, the politicized creature who got her her job, from Trump, or why Jill's event was four times more important than Trump's as a security matter in terms of numbers of Agents dispatched.

Someone like this has clearly turned the Secret Service into a crony protection racket, not a world-class protective unit for political figures, and any protectee rightly ought to worry if this ugly mixture of incompetence and politicization was actually going to protect them. It's not surprising that one congresswoman, Rep. Nancy Mace, a South Carolina Republican, summed Cheatle up as "full of s***."

The New York Times erroneously claimed it was just Republicans criticizing her, but that was bad reporting. The Washington Post and other media outlets noted that the calls were bipartisan, including the likes of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and yes, they should have been bipartisan. What protectee, of either party, could be confident of having actual protection in an ocean of failure and obfuscation like that?

Not only should Cheatle go, her boss, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas should go, too. He's escaped all of his failures without consequences, yet ran an operation that couldn't do its job with any credibility, and never once tried to fix it.

Now it's obvious, and apparently the political heat was too hot, so the swamp sacrificed Cheatle. The others need to see their heads roll too.

Image: Screen shot from LiveNOW from Fox video, via YouTube.