A week after a gunman allegedly invaded a dinner party and attempted to kill President Trump and others, important questions remain about various security agencies.
New video shows White House correspondents’ dinner shooting
Security camera footage from the Washington Hilton showed Cole Thomas Allen forcing his way through the security checkpoint.
WASHINGTON — More than a week after prosecutors said a gunman stormed into the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner and is suspected of trying to assassinate President Donald Trump, lawmakers, former Secret Service officials and security experts say the official response leaves wide-ranging questions unanswered.
The Secret Service says a layered security plan worked to prevent the suspect from reaching the banquet hall and injuring VIP guardians, but much remains unknown about what happened outside the Secret Service perimeter separating the annual event, attended by about 2,500 people, from the extremely crowded Washington Hilton hotel where it was held.
Some say Congress should at least hold hearings on the shooting, as it did after the Secret Service had another would-be assassin injure President Trump at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, in July 2024, before he was shot and killed by the agency’s anti-sniper team.
At the April 25 dinner, hotel guest and gunman Cole Thomas Allen sprinted through metal detectors on the perimeter of the Secret Service building with a shotgun, tripped and fell, and was subdued by security.
In addition to President Trump, the event was attended by members of the presidential line of succession, including Vice President J.D. Vance, many Cabinet members, and 92-year-old Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley.
Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Missouri, called for an oversight hearing to determine whether the Secret Service did its job properly with sufficient resources and whether the reforms promised by the protection agency after the Butler crisis were implemented.
In a letter to Republican chairmen, Hawley noted that after Butler, the Senate Homeland Security Committee conducted a bipartisan investigation, held public hearings, produced a detailed report documenting significant deficiencies and developed proposals to address them.
“This was an important part of a broader effort to understand and fix what went wrong, whether it was communications failures, technical issues or lack of resources,” Hawley told Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul.
“The American people deserve full transparency in the wake of yet another apparent assassination attempt by President Trump,” he said.
One of the attendees at the Correspondents’ Dinner, Republican Congressman Mike Lawler of New York, went further in his post about X.
Lawler said there were “a number of obvious safety issues” and called for a “full and thorough” investigation into “how the shooter gained access from a hotel room to a secure location with numerous firearms.”
“The site was set up perfectly”
So far, the Secret Service has stuck to its official position that it did everything in its power to stop Mr. Allen, who was one floor above the president and other wards dining with journalists and dignitaries.
Secret Service Director Sean Curran told Fox News on April 30 that the agency’s “layered approach” worked as intended.
Mr. Allen did break through the perimeter, but other uniformed officers, agents, rifle teams and “other assets” stood between him and the agency’s guardians, Mr. Curran acknowledged.
“We’re doing an investigation. We’re doing an analysis of the explosion. And from beginning to end, we’re talking about almost 355 feet from the magnetometer to the podium,” Curran said. “That’s a long distance to reach.”
All things considered, Curran said, “The site was set up perfectly.”
The White House said in a statement on April 27 that Trump and White House staff “support the Secret Service leadership” and that the president “personally believes they did an outstanding job of neutralizing the shooter and safely transporting the President, First Lady Melania Trump, and Vice President J.D. Vance.”
The White House said Chief of Staff Susie Wiles will meet with Secret Service and Homeland Security leaders to discuss security in the aftermath of the shooting.
Grassley, the Senate president pro tempore and chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, also said he would review the protection agency’s bylaws.
On May 4, Secret Service spokesman Joseph Routh told USA TODAY that Curran met with Republican and Democratic members of both the House and Senate last week and provided them with a “comprehensive overview of the security plan and the events leading up to the shooting.”
“It’s a complete joke.”
Still, the official statement defending the Secret Service does not answer a series of questions raised by lawmakers, former officials and security experts.
Juliette Kayem, the Obama administration’s top official at the Department of Homeland Security, said she initially thought the Secret Service could conduct its own investigation into the incident to determine what went wrong and how things could be improved.
But after hearing Curran’s remarks, she told USA TODAY she now disagrees.
“I don’t have a lot of confidence in the Secret Service’s vetting in this time of so much politicization,” said security firm Kayem. The company’s security firm advises host cities and private sector partners on World Cup security. “I couldn’t believe it when the coach said that.”
It’s one thing to say the perimeter worked, but other aspects of security at and around the dinner party raise serious questions, Kayyem said, such as whether the Secret Service should play a greater role in securing space outside the perimeter and investigating and monitoring potential threats. Allen arrived at the hotel the day before with the intention of assassinating Trump and other administration officials.
“To say everything went well is a total joke,” Kayem said.
Critical unanswered questions
Unanswered questions also remain about what happened inside and outside the protective perimeter, what could have gone wrong, and which institutions, if any, are responsible.
“They won’t look into it themselves. The public won’t believe it,” said former Secret Service Director John Magaw, calling for an external FBI investigation into the former agency.
James Reno, a longtime security consultant, told USA TODAY that even if the main security perimeter is strong, “public and adjacent spaces outside of it can pose a variety of challenges that are difficult to control in real time.”
“Incidents like this highlight the complexity of securing large, high-profile events that span multiple zones, agencies, and hierarchies of responsibility,” said Reno, vice president of Shooter Detection Systems and Alarm.com.
D.C. Metropolitan Police Department spokesman Tom Lynch said it’s too early to answer at least some important questions, including how local law enforcement agencies like MPD can best assist the Secret Service in such cases.
Lynch told USA TODAY in a May 1 interview that “this is the fifth or sixth day after the incident occurred, but it could take months or even years for a review of this magnitude to be comprehensive.”
Who was in charge outside the confines of the Secret Service?
Beyond the shooting itself, the incident exposed broader questions about security lapses in the public areas of the sprawling hotel, which occupies an entire city block a few miles north of the White House.
The hotel, outside the site where another would-be assassin tried to kill President Ronald Reagan in 1981, was open to guests and other visitors during the event, including hundreds of Washington VIPs and journalists who attended more than a dozen pre-event parties held on various levels of the hotel.
Lawler said in his post that no one asked for photo ID and that “there was no verified list of attendees.”
“We did not have a good idea of how many members of Congress attended the event and where they were located in the venue,” Lawler wrote.
He also said there were a number of pre-party parties near the hotel, attended by government leaders, and that there were no metal detectors to deter potential gunmen.
At least some of that security will be provided by the U.S. Capitol Police, the primary protection agency for members of Congress, including at events outside the Capitol. The agency did not respond to USA TODAY’s request for comment.
In emails and other documents released by investigators, Allen, the gunman, marveled at the hotel’s lack of security, from being allowed to check in with a small arsenal of weapons to wandering the grounds hours before breaking through a Secret Service security perimeter to enter a ballroom where an event was being held.
“I came in with multiple weapons, and no one there considered that I could be a threat,” he said in a letter he wrote to his family shortly before the attack, published by the New York Post. A law enforcement official confirmed the details to USA TODAY.
“Security for the event is all outside and focused on protesters and those currently arriving, as no one seems to be thinking about what might happen if someone checked in the day before,” Allen wrote.
The Secret Service said the crime was confined to a perimeter leading to a banquet hall on the lower floor of the hotel.
But McGaw, former Secret Service Deputy Director A.T. Smith and other security experts told USA TODAY that an investigation is needed into how Allen was able to move around the hotel with the weapon, including descending a flight of stairs and exiting near a checkpoint, an area generally outside the Secret Service’s secure zone.
A senior law enforcement official told USA TODAY that these areas are under the jurisdiction of hotel security or local police, and that federal protection agencies are prohibited from identifying people for questioning or searching unless they are acting suspiciously.
What is the responsibility of supporting security agencies?
Metropolitan Police Department spokesperson Lynch said the department’s role is limited and falls under the direction of the Secret Service.
“We weren’t at first base for this,” Lynch said. He said police provided security for the event outside the Secret Service perimeter, but declined to give details such as the number of personnel deployed for security reasons.
“I’m sure we’ll be part of their broader consideration on this, which could change the way they want us to support them,” he said. “But to my knowledge, at this point, we are not independently reviewing aspects of what happened that day.”
Lynch declined to say whether MPD had identified any problems with its own officers, cautioning that it was too early to draw conclusions.
Capitol Police did not release a statement about the dinner, other than to say immediately after the dinner that “the members of Congress who attended the White House Correspondents’ Dinner are safe and secure. We are here to support our federal government and local partners in whatever they need.”
