3 days after correspondents’ dinner, FBI still unsure who shot officer outside ballroom

The FBI has not found the fragment that pierced a Secret Service officer’s bulletproof vest at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday, leaving investigators unable to say for certain whether the armed attacker shot the officer or how he was injured, according to two people briefed on the probe.

Law enforcement agents on the scene Saturday believe Cole Tomas Allen, the suspect who breached the dinner’s final checkpoint, fired his shotgun and struck the officer with buckshot from his weapon, according to one of the people, who asked not to be named due to the sensitivity of the ongoing probe. A check of Allen’s shotgun showed that he discharged a shell but did not reload, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche told reporters Monday.

But a mystery surrounds Allen’s use of his weapon — and the scuffle and shooting just above the Washington Hilton ballroom, where President Donald Trump and many senior administration officials had gathered for the dinner. 

Allen was charged on Monday with attempting to assassinate the president of the United States, as well as transportation of a firearm over state lines and discharge of a firearm during a crime of violence. 

On Saturday, Allen sprinted through a final screening checkpoint just above an open stairway to the ballroom, prompting one Secret Service officer from the uniformed division to shoot five rounds at the fleeing man. Investigators collected the firearms of all Secret Service officers and agents on the scene and found no evidence that anyone else fired their weapons, one law enforcement official said.

Here are other new details MS NOW has learned about the incident:

• No officers or agents were stationed in the stairwell that Allen used to get to the main hotel floor and just steps from the checkpoint he breached. Investigators’ review of hotel video shows Allen reached the checkpoint, where magnetometers screened guests for weapons, by walking down the stairwell 10 floors down from his hotel room, one of the people said. 

“He didn’t dilly dally once he got there,” one person who saw the footage said. “He just immediately went for the checkpoint.”

The Secret Service does not require agents in stairwells of this public hotel when they are outside the magnetometer-screened perimeter of the dinner event.

• In its review, a Secret Service team estimated that Allen was running nine miles an hour, one person in the briefing said, and then stumbled somehow and fell a few yards from the checkpoint. That raises the question among law enforcement professionals of how a person moving that fast could have stopped and fired his weapon at an officer behind him.

• After Allen fell, agents and officers jumped on top of him to tackle and subdue him, two people told MS NOW. But initially, law enforcement on the scene believed one of them had shot Allen because he was not immediately responsive, a law enforcement official said. 

• Allen’s mother and father are cooperating with FBI agents leading the investigation into the incident and Allen’s self-professed plans to kill Trump administration officials gathered at the dinner. Investigators have learned that Allen’s brother had growing concerns in recent weeks with an uptick in disturbing rhetoric from Allen, according to one of the people.

• The Secret Service on Monday began a sweeping internal investigation to determine whether there were any security lapses or a need for hardening security protocols as a result of the breach. Known as a Mission Assurance Review, this investigation is run by the Service’s Office of Professional Responsibility and is often considered a way to learn lessons from a serious incident and improve security in the future.

The FBI declined to comment to MS NOW.

The ability of Allen to breach the final checkpoint at the Washington Hilton has raised alarm among top White House aides, even though no one was seriously injured and officers and agents were able to stop Allen before he reached the ballroom doors. The doors were also guarded by armed law enforcement officers and agents. 

The shooting one floor above the ballroom has spurred White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles to request a meeting with the Secret Service director and Department of Homeland Security officials about both the incident and how to harden security for Trump for a series of large events planned in the coming weeks.

This is the third time in less than two years that an untrained and armed man, charged with seeking to assassinate Trump, has gotten close to the president by breaching the perimeter the Secret Service created for his protection. 

In a July 2024 shooting that was considered a colossal failure of the service’s most basic security protocols, an armed college student was able to clamber onto a nearby rooftop during a Trump campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, and shoot at Trump’s stage, grazing his ear and killing a spectator on the risers behind him. 

Recommended

A Mission Assurance Review later found a relatively inexperienced agent, who had not planned a major event before, was assigned to coordinate security for the rally, and failed to secure the roof properly. It also found communication teams failed to warn other agents of reports of a man acting strangely and climbing onto the roof.

In September 2024, Ryan Routh, a roofer and anti-war activist, hid in the bushes with a rifle at Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Florida, planning to kill Trump while he golfed that Saturday morning. An agent discovered and shot at him. Routh fled but was arrested hours later.

At a Monday news conference, Blanche said Allen had been charged with discharging a firearm during a crime of violence because the FBI determined he fired a single shell from the shotgun he was carrying.  But he said authorities were not prepared to say whether that was the shot that hit the Secret Service agent’s body armor.

“We want to get that right,” he said. “So we’re still looking at that.”

“All the evidence is being examined very carefully and expeditiously, and we’ll know more soon. We do believe that, as the complaint lays out, that the suspect, that the defendant fired out of his shotgun, and we know that that happened.”

Blanche said the shotgun shell had not been ejected from the weapon, meaning the attacker didn’t cock and reload it. 

Blanche said investigators determined that the agent who was shot fired five rounds at the suspect, none of which hit him. But he said they could not be sure those were the only rounds fired by law enforcement officers. 

“When you fire a bullet, it ends up somewhere,” he said. “Sometimes you find it and sometimes you don’t.”

FBI agents had departed and apparently cleared the crime scene at the Hilton by early Sunday morning, when MS NOW reporters and other members of the public were able to walk through it.

Carol Leonnig

Carol Leonnig is a senior investigative reporter with MS NOW.

Ken Dilanian

Ken Dilanian is the justice and intelligence correspondent for MS NOW.