According to the acting lawyer. General Todd Blanche and other senior administration officials, the US Secret Service did an excellent job protecting President Trump and Cabinet members from the gunman who stormed the White House Correspondents' Association. Saturday dinner.
“That horrible act was stopped thanks to the courage and professionalism of the authorities – the officers who responded without hesitation and did their jobs as they were trained to do,” Blanche said Monday.
But according to a detailed report filed Wednesday by federal prosecutors in the criminal case against suspect Cole Tomas Allen, the performance of the nation's top protection agency was marred by inattention and misfires and was saved by “extraordinary good luck” and a gunman who fell to the ground.
“The defendant, armed with a 12-gauge shotgun, a .38-caliber pistol, two knives, four daggers and enough ammunition to claim dozens of lives, was arrested by [Secret Service] “The officers were just yards from the ballroom where their primary target was located, along with other members of the Cabinet,” prosecutors wrote Wednesday, in a document arguing that Allen would remain detained pending trial on one count of attempting to kill the president and two firearms charges.
Contradicting an earlier claim by Blanche that officers had “quickly attacked and detained” Allen, prosecutors wrote that the 31-year-old guardian from Torrance simply “fell to the ground” after passing a team of officers just two flights of open stairs from the ballroom.
They wrote that an officer shot Allen five times, but never hit him.
The same officer saw Allen fire his shotgun “in the direction of the stairs leading to the ballroom,” prosecutors wrote, and officers later discovered “one spent shell in the barrel and eight unfired shells in the magazine tube.”
Prosecutors said nothing about the Secret Service officer who Blanche said was shot in his ballistic vest during the incident, adding to speculation that the officer may have been shot not by Allen, but by a fellow officer, or by no shot at all.
Agency criticized before
Overall, the court filing further highlighted a chaotic Secret Service response that appeared flawed from the beginning, including in a video Trump posted shortly after the incident in which agents appeared to be idling around a clear entrance when Allen ran past them.
This added to concerns that law enforcement, security experts and members of Congress had raised about the performance of an agency that has been repeatedly asked to improve after previous attempts on Trump's life. At a 2024 campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, a gunman fired a bullet that grazed Trump's ear, and that same year, another gunman prepared to shoot him from the unsecured perimeter of a Florida golf course.
Robert D'Amico, former FBI deputy chief of operations for hostage rescue teams and now a security consultant, said the security failures he saw in the Secret Service's preparation for Saturday's dinner (including its failure to set up basic barriers to stop people from running into the secured area) were surprising, especially considering past threats and the fact that the nation is at war with Iran.
“Is it for a person like Trump, who has had two assassination attempts before and is at war with Iran, who has terrorist training and proxies, and still doesn't have the basics?” D'Amico said. “It's unfathomable.”
Members of Congress, including Republicans, have raised other concerns.
The House Oversight Committee requested a Secret Service briefing, and Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) requested a hearing before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, which also investigated the Butler incident.
In a letter urging the hearing, Hawley said the latest incident “raises questions about presidential security arrangements, potential resource needs, and the extent to which Congress's previously proposed reforms have been adopted.”
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) told Fox News that from “a layman's perspective,” event security “seemed a little lax in terms of getting into the building” and that “it didn't seem like it was enough.”
Sean M. Curran, director of the Secret Service, has been at the Capitol in recent days briefing lawmakers.
He told CBS News that the officers did a “great job,” but also that the incident remains under review. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt has said that White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles would lead discussions on possible updates to the Secret Service's plans to protect the president.
Fear of more serious threats
Blanche has argued that the proof of the Secret Service's effectiveness at the press gala was in the outcome: Allen was detained, Trump and other officials were unharmed, and no one died, despite Allen's alleged intention.
However, the concerns raised have to do with both the vulnerabilities that were exposed and those that were exploited.
Because the dinner was not designated a major “special national security event,” such as a political convention, there were no trained counterattack officers ready to prevent a breach or take down a person with a weapon, officials said.
Law enforcement experts said that was clearly a mistake given that so many top officials — Trump, Johnson, Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, among others — were in the room.
Such a gathering could have been targeted by foreign adversaries or others with far more experience, less respect for human life and far greater firepower than Allen, experts said.
“Most of my military friends say the same thing,” said D'Amico, who was also a former U.S. Marine infantry platoon commander. “If you had a team of three or four [gunmen]they would have reached [Trump].'”
In the initial criminal complaint against Allen, prosecutors included the text of an email Allen sent to his family just as he was preparing to break through the security perimeter, in which he allegedly wrote that he had chosen to use birdshot to “minimize casualties” and prevent bystanders from being injured by more powerful bullets that penetrate walls.
He also allegedly wrote that he was willing to “vet almost everyone” at the event to reach senior management officials, but that hotel guests and staff were “not at all objective.”
In Wednesday's filing, prosecutors describe Allen's actions as “premeditated, violent and calculated to cause death” and say he was “loaded with weapons” when he breached security. But none of those weapons included assault rifles that can fire bullets rapidly and have been used to kill civilians in mass shootings across the country for years.
The presentation described Allen, a Caltech graduate and high school tutor, not as a trained tactical expert, but as an ideologue who spent part of his Amtrak trip from California to Washington waxing poetic about the landscape around him, describing the forests of Pennsylvania as “vast fairy lands full of little streams in the spring.”
It could have been worse
D'Amico said he and other Marines learned early on in Iraq that entrances to safe locations must be designed in a “serpentine” fashion, forcing anyone approaching to move more slowly through the area and giving security officials more time to evaluate their intentions. And at an event the size of a correspondents' dinner, with so many senior officials gathered in a public hotel, he would want to make entrances “even more difficult.”
And yet, there seemed to be no barriers to the event, he said, something anyone who had trained more than Allen could have taken advantage of.
“If they had come out as a team of three or four coordinated and trained people, there would have been absolute penetration into the ballroom,” D'Amico said. “It would have been a shooting.”
Allen himself questioned security at the event, according to court records, and allegedly wrote that he had entered the Washington Hilton with multiple weapons and no one considered “the possibility that I could be a threat.”
He wrote that if “I were an Iranian agent, instead of an American citizen,” “I could have brought a damn Ma Deuce here and no one would have noticed,” referring to a powerful machine gun.
“It's lucky he was only armed with what he had,” said Ed Obayashi, a California law enforcement expert on use of force.
