Transcript of Assassination Attempt Suspect Charged New

Good afternoon, everybody. Thanks for being here. On Saturday night, as you all know, an act of violence occurred at a gathering that symbolizes something fundamental to our system of government.

From The New York Times, I'm Rachel Abrams, and this is The Daily.

Today, the Department of Justice filed 3 federal charges in United States District Court against Cole Thomas Allen.

[FOREIGN LANGUAGE] On Monday, the man accused of storming the White House Correspondents' Center with multiple weapons was charged in federal court in Washington, D.C.

Violence has no place in civic life. It cannot and will not be used to disrupt democratic institutions or intimidate those who serve them, and it certainly cannot continue to be used against the President of the United States.

Today, Devlin Barrett explains what we're learning about the suspect, his plan to target the president, and whether this entire event should ultimately be thought of as a security failure or success. It's Tuesday, April 28th. Devlin Barrett, welcome back to The Daily.

Thanks for having me.

So we've been getting some clarity on who the shooter was who attempted to storm the White House Correspondents' Dinner on Saturday. Details have been emerging since this happened, but Devlin, you cover the Justice Department for The Times. Tell us what we learned on Monday.

So on Monday, there were a few key developments. First, The suspect, Cole Allen, was formally charged in a criminal complaint. He was charged with attempting to assassinate the president. That wasn't the only charge, but it's the most important charge by far, because that charge carries a potential life sentence. The other two charges in the criminal complaint are transportation of a firearm over interstate commerce, and that's a reference to him allegedly bringing weapons across country. And discharge of a firearm during a crime of violence. That charge basically means that he fired the weapon while committing a crime. And one thing that officials have emphasized since this happened is that the first round of charges aren't going to be their last word on this. There may be more charges added as they understand the evidence better and as they have a better grasp on what exactly they think happened.

Let's talk for a moment about the suspect. At this point, what have we learned about his background?

So, once this happened, obviously, we've been trying to figure out as much as we can about his background, about his life. He's 31, he's from Torrance, California, and he's, by all accounts, a smart guy. He has a master's in computer science. He went to Caltech, which is not an easy school to get into. Mm-hmm. We know that he, you know, was raised in the Protestant church, and his father was a church elder. And in talking to people who know him, and talked to some of his former students, because he worked as a tutor for a good bit of time, they all describe him as nice, cheerful, a bit of a nerd. Um, and all of them that have been interviewed by reporters express shock and surprise that the person they knew as this tutor and academic would do anything like this.

Mm-hmm.

We also know that he left behind a kind of apology note, an explanation note, to— his friends and family.

Like many people, I read the letter that he wrote, and it is apologizing for what he's done. It's sort of a goodbye letter to people that he loves. It is imagining at times a Q&A where he imagines criticism, and then he imagines what he would say in response to that criticism about his actions. Do we have any information about what radicalized this man that made him go from being angry and aggrieved to actually picking up weapons traveling across the country and attempting to assassinate the president?

Not yet. You know, the FBI is combing through his online presence, interviewing his family and friends. So far, the online presence, the online postings suggest that he was a liberal-minded person who had liberal political views and was very unhappy and upset and angry about things the Trump administration was doing. That seems to be a driving factor for him. But in terms of how did he get to that point, that's something that the FBI is still unpacking.

Can you just explain, Devlin, why is that piece of writing relevant to the charges that we saw today?

Well, it's super relevant to what prosecutors will have to ultimately prove in court, which is the mindset of someone and the aims and goals of someone who was tackled and, you know, taken down, you know, very early in his attempted attack, for prosecutors, helps explain what his actual target was, what his targets were. That's why this note to his family is so important, because he makes pretty clear, without ever really saying Trump's name in the writing, that Trump is the one he is most angry at.

Trump is the one he is hoping to get to, because presumably they would not have been able to charge him with attempting to assassinate the president if they did not know what his motivation was, because he did not actually get close enough to the president to attempt any kind of assassination. Do I have that right?

Right.

You mentioned earlier that the suspect was from California. I'm sure by now a lot of people are aware that he traveled from California to try to carry out the shooting in DC. What do we know about what and how he planned?

So we know that he bought the two weapons involved, a pump-action shotgun and a.38 caliber pistol in recent years. He bought those in California, and he traveled with them when he came to Washington. That doesn't mean that he's been planning to do this from the moment he bought those weapons. It just means that he bought the weapons several years ago.

Right.

And in early March, the president announces that he will go to this dinner. It's called the White House Correspondents Association Dinner. It is a big production in the nation's capital. They do it every year. Every year around this time, and this president hasn't typically gone to it.

Mm-hmm.

So in some sense, it was a bigger deal this year because Trump had decided to go. Mm-hmm. Prosecutors say in the beginning of April, the suspect starts making his travel plans to go to Washington. And so, in late April, he gets on a train from Los Angeles, and that goes to Chicago. Once he gets to Chicago, he buys a ticket to Washington, D.C. He arrives in Washington, D.C. on Friday and checks into the hotel, the Washington Hilton. That's the same hotel where this big gala dinner is going to be held.

Right.

Then on Saturday night, the night of the event, the dinner gala proper begins at around 8 o'clock. Around 8:30, there's security camera footage that shows the suspect racing, just sprinting all out through the first security checkpoint. And you can sort of see the shotgun in his hand. You can't really see the handgun or the knives that agents say they later took off of him. But he races through that checkpoint and out of the frame of the video. Law enforcement officials say that The part you can't see that happens right after that is that one of those agents turns and fires 5 shots at the suspect. And none of those shots actually hit him, but he does fall to the ground and is quickly tackled and disarmed. Law enforcement officials also say that the same agent who fired also gets struck by a round in his protective vest. The vest protects him, and he's not badly injured, but that agent does take a bullet in the vest. Some of what unfolds next is actually quite similar to other security scares. People hear what they think are gunshots. They're not sure what's happening. They're not sure where the danger is, but they're told to get down, essentially, like, "Just get down, you know, lower than your table, so if there is a gunman, he can't see you." And that's what a lot of people in the ballroom are doing in that moment.

And, you know, it's basically basically 90, 120 seconds of real terror, because no one really knows what the danger is or what direction it's coming from. [Speaker:JESSE] But at the same time, you've got Secret Service agents outside the ballroom dealing with the suspect on the floor above, and you've got Secret Service agents on the floor of the ballroom essentially doing their best to seal off and make sure no one goes in or out of the ballroom in that moment to keep the people inside the room safe. And you've got the President's security detail and the Vice President's security detail moving them as quickly as they can off the dais to get them out of harm's way.

Right.

So, once it's clear that no one has been killed in this incident, no one has been seriously injured in this incident, it becomes more of a question of, "Okay, how does this keep happening?" This is at least the third time someone has tried to kill President Trump in one form or another. And so it raises a whole bunch of questions about the security at the event and, you know, preparation for the event.

We'll be right back. Devlin, before the break, you mentioned that a lot of questions have emerged about the security around this event. And I have seen a bunch of different reports essentially criticizing what happened as a security failure, just the fact that an armed gunman could get as far as he did. He said in his letter how unimpressed he was with security at the hotel. What do you make of all of that criticism?

I mean, look, some of it is a very natural human reaction, right? To the horror and surprise that someone did this at all. That part, I think, is perfectly understandable, and it's always worth asking questions. You know, I cover law enforcement. That's sort of what I do every day. I think here, though, there's a big difference between, for example, the assassination attempt against Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania in 2024 and what happened here, because I think there was a clear security failure in Butler where you had a rooftop with a sightline toward the candidate that was not protected, that was not guarded. I think most security experts would tell you that's an obvious thing that needs to be guarded, right? Here, the situation I think is quite different in that this person tried to essentially bum rush a fancy black-tie gala. He made made it a matter of steps past the initial security screening, but he never even got onto the floor where the event was happening.

Mm-hmm.

He was taken down and tackled before he could even get to the stairs that led to that floor. So, in talking to former Secret Service and talking to other security experts, a lot of folks have said to me, "Look, if the question is, what do you do to prevent this, this is what the perimeter is for. The perimeter is designed to deal with this issue." before you're close to the event itself. And that's what happened here. I do think that you're going to see, though, a number of conversations and debates about, "Well, maybe this hotel is not the best place to hold these events anymore," because you do have a functioning hotel right on top of a large ballroom. A lot of the questions and concerns I've seen raised about what happened on Saturday really sort of center on the idea that the hotel itself wasn't safe.

That's certainly what the suspect was pointing out in what he wrote.

Well, exactly. And that's what he seemed to really focus on in this letter he sent to family and friends. He seemed to think the security was terrible, and the security didn't really police the lobby, didn't really police the guests. He has a sort of simplistic understanding of all the security measures around him and doesn't quite grasp that the security he observes Friday night and Saturday morning is not the same security that is in place by Saturday night. And I think a lot of people don't necessarily understand all of the multilayered things that go into securing an event like that. And strangely enough, the gunman was one of the people who didn't understand all the layers that go into that.

Can you tell us a little bit about what goes into securing an event like this? Like, you had mentioned earlier that the security worked essentially the way that it was supposed to. I'm curious kind of what you mean by that.

So, the thing to keep in mind is the goal of the security for this event was not to secure the entire hotel.

Hmm.

And I think that's where some of the disagreements come, which is like, well, maybe should it be? Should, for example, the security perimeter be pushed out, essentially outside the building itself, so that you've already gone past magnetometers, for example, before you get into the building at all? But that's not how this hotel is designed, and that's not how this ballroom space is designed. I spoke to security experts who said, "Look, if you push the perimeter out further and further, that's not necessarily an improvement because the actual thing you're trying to protect is not the hotel. The actual thing you're trying to protect is the gathering of all of these senior government officials." To put another way, it's not Secret Service's job to protect the lobby of a hotel. Absolutely. I will say there is one, I think, important security question here that hasn't really been answered and might change our understanding of the security for this event. And that is, did law enforcement, whether you're talking about Secret Service or FBI or California Police, did law enforcement agents before all this happened have any understanding that this person might be a threat to the president.

And we don't really, I think, have a clear answer to that yet. But if the answer is yes, then why weren't tripwires telling investigators that this person was coming? But that's a big if, right? We don't know the answer to that yet.

And do you think, Devlin, that we will get clarity about that? Do you have any indication somebody is, like, working on getting the public an answer? Is there an investigation into what other law enforcement agencies may have known?

Right. It's an obvious question. We're certainly trying to get that answer ourselves. I'm sure others are as well. I'm sure Congress is trying to get that answer. And to be clear, sometimes it takes a while for the law enforcement agencies to do a full scrub of all of their files and make sure of what they were told in the past about a particular person. It's not something as simple as just punching a name into the government agency equivalent of Google and just spitting out a name and maybe a file or two. It takes a bit of effort and time to make sure that there isn't anything anywhere in the system.

I don't think I can recall a president slash presidential candidate, just to be really precise about our language here, who has had this many attempts on their life in such a short amount of time. We have seen, in addition to this, attacks on politicians in Minneapolis and Israeli embassy staffers in DC, just to name a couple examples of why I think It feels to a lot of people like we're living in this age of heightened political violence. And Devlin, just given what you cover, your experience, I just wonder if this is how you also see it and what you make of this.

So it's a great question. One thing is definitely increased, and that is the number of threats just floating around the internet, the number of threats that go after not just politicians, but for example, judges and schools and hospitals and all manner of American public life have a much larger increase in just threats being thrown around. That is definitely increased. There's data that show that's increased. I think that is a problem for law enforcement because all of the agencies that are designed to protect all these people, whether it's local cops, federal marshals, FBI agents, Secret Service agents, they are having to dig through more information. There's sort of a sea of hostility out there online, a sea of angry, threatening language that makes it harder and more time-consuming to figure out who is really dangerous and who is just sort of a keyboard commando. So that's one challenge. And to the question of, is there more political violence in America, I think it depends on how you measure. If your measurement is Assassination attempts against a sitting president or a presidential candidate, I think you have to say the last few years would argue the answer is yes.

If the question is political violence in all its forms, I think that becomes a much harder question to answer because there has always been a degree of political violence in this country. It's not like there's some golden age prior to this of no political violence in this country. And I think part of the answer lies in What types of political violence do you count?

I actually have that exact question because as you're speaking, I'm wondering whether you would count somebody who goes into a school having written 1,000 words about a political grievance and commits a mass act of violence. Would that be considered political violence, even if the targets are not themselves politicians, for example, or elected officials?

Right. I mean, most of the time when we talk about political violence, we talk about violence that is motivated by politics. And so, in that scenario, the victim isn't, you know, a quote-unquote "political victim," but the act is carried out in the name of a political issue, I think most people would consider that to be political violence. So, if you look at political violence in terms of the motivation, and if you look at political violence in terms of who is affected by it, a lot of the people in that ballroom on Saturday night did not grow up with school lockdown drills. Some of them did, but a lot of them didn't. I think younger Americans, frankly, have a little more experience than older Americans with that type of incident, that type of fear. And it may be that part of what happened on Saturday is more and more of that type of danger, more and more of that type of panicked response is finding its way not just into our schools or hospitals or other public places, but into even the most high-profile, powerful gatherings of American government officials.

How does law enforcement deal with all of that? And are we in an age where it is worth contemplating whether the president of the United States can actually be safe in a public event like this?

So as part of this larger debate about how to keep the president safe, how to keep senior officials safe, The president and his senior advisors are all arguing that this incident only shows how badly they need to finish construction of the White House ballroom. This is a larger fight that, you know, has been going on for months about whether this is really necessary or proper and whether the president can do it on his own without congressional approval. A judge has said no, but that legal fight is still going on, and What you've seen since Saturday's event is both the president and his senior aides arguing very forcefully that this is exactly the kind of thing that the ballroom would prevent from happening or make more difficult to happen. Right. But I think the challenge for law enforcement is really two things. One, you have to keep certainly the president safe and senior government officials safe. Events like Saturday, show you how difficult that can be, and that it may be becoming more difficult to keep them safe. But I also think part of the challenge here for law enforcement is making the public feel like the president is safe, making the public feel—

Mm-hmm.

—that senior government officials are safe. And if a guy with a shotgun can just sort of storm a security checkpoint and cause a great deal of panic and fear, In that sense, it may be becoming harder and harder for law enforcement to prevent that kind of incident. And I think one of the challenges here for the government and for the public is what are you willing to do or not do to be as secure as possible? Where do you draw the line between public life and government having events, you know, this was a very secure event in many, many ways. But I think a lot of the people walked out of that ballroom feeling more afraid and more in danger than they'd ever felt in their lives. Devlin Barrett, thank you so much. Thanks for having me.

We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. President Trump and First Lady Melania Trump demanded that ABC pull comedian Jimmy Kimmel from a airwaves over a bit that he did about the president and the first lady that was delivered days before the attempted shooting at the White House Correspondents' Dinner. First lady Melania is here. In the bit, Kimmel, who has a long history of sparring with the president, had imagined himself as the emcee at the dinner.

Look at— well, so beautiful.

Mrs.

Trump, you have a glow like an expectant widow.

The comments come months after ABC temporarily —pulled Kimmel's late-night show after a conservative uproar over the way that he described the politics of the man accused of shooting the right-wing activist Charlie Kirk. And President Trump has told advisers he is not satisfied with Iran's latest proposal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and end the war. The proposal also called on the United States to end its naval blockade, but would have set aside questions about what to do with Iran's nuclear program. Iran has repeatedly rejected American proposals to suspend its nuclear program and hand over its stockpile of highly enriched uranium. Today's episode was produced by Diana Wynn, Mary Wilson, with help from Mujshedi. It was edited by Devin Taylor, Liz O'Balen, and Michael Benoit. Contains music by Sophia Landman and Dan Powell. Our theme music is by Wonderly. This episode was engineered by Chris Wood. That's it for The Daily. I'm Rachel Abrams. See you tomorrow.