Gunman’s Path Raises Alarms About Federal Security Breakdown at Correspondents’ Dinner

Two days after a gunman broke through a security checkpoint and shot a U.S. Secret Service agent at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, new questions are emerging about security at the event and just how much authorities knew about the suspect prior to Saturday’s attack. On Monday, the FBI director, Kash Patel, declined to confirm whether authorities were alerted by the relatives of the alleged shooter, Cole Tomas Allen, in the moments leading up to the attack or afterward, instead saying that “all those questions will be answered in the complaint” once it has been signed off by a federal magistrate.“What we’re going to do is continue to look at the interviews that we’ve conducted, the dozens and dozens of interviews we’ve conducted over the weekend, and put that in one place to show you what he did, how he got there, when he got there, when he arrived, how he got down to the arena, to the area in question, how he was able to get through security undetected,” Mr. Patel told “Fox & Friends.”Mr. Allen is due in court later Monday.On Sunday, the Associated Press reported that Mr. Allen, a 31-year-old part-time tutor and video game developer from Torrance, California, sent writings to relatives referring to himself as a “Friendly Federal Assassin” and complaining about the Trump administration’s use of airstrikes against alleged drug smuggling boats in the eastern Pacific Ocean, among other policy decisions. His manifesto included a list of senior administration officials he identified as “targets, prioritized from highest-ranking to lowest.” Mr. Patel was explicitly excluded from the list for reasons that remain unclear. “Fox & Friends” hosts did not ask Mr. Patel about his exclusion from the list during his appearance.The Washington Hilton, which was the site of a 1981 assassination attempt of President Reagan by John Hinckley Jr., had considerably beefed up its security after that incident, including “a bunker-like garage for the armored limousine to park and drop off and pick up the president,” the Associated Press reported. But shutting down the Washington Hilton, which has “many public areas,” is difficult to do during an event like the correspondents’ dinner — a primary reason why the security checkpoint for the event was near the hotel ballroom and not the hotel lobby, per the Associated Press. Mr. Allen is believed to have traveled by train from Los Angeles to Chicago, and then to Washington D.C., where he checked into the Washington Hilton “in the last day or two” prior to Saturday’s attack, the Acting Attorney General, Todd Blanche, told NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday. Mr. Allen is accused of running through the checkpoint that led into the ballroom, where Messrs. Trump and Patel, among others, were gathered for the dinner on Saturday night. Mr. Allen shot an officer in his bullet-resistant vest before being subdued by officers and agents. “We’re going to be talking about how we improve the security, not just for this event, but for all events going forward,” Mr. Patel said. “We’re going to learn from this one.”Mr. Allen’s writings, released in full by multiple media outlets, expressed surprise at the ease with which he was able to enter and check into the hotel a day prior to the event while armed with a weapon — and while hotel staff and security were apparently unaware. Shortly after receiving the writings, Mr. Allen’s brother contacted his local law enforcement, the New London Police Department in Connecticut, the Associated Press reported. The New London Police issued a statement that it received a communication from an individual with information about the shooter at 10:49 p.m., more than two hours after the shooting. In cases like Mr. Allen’s, even with advance notice, it is not always certain that law enforcement could act in time to thwart an attack like Saturday’s.“If police called the New Haven, Connecticut, office and made allegations about someone living within the Los Angeles field office territory, that information would be forwarded to that office, and it may take days or sadly weeks before an agent acts on that information, if at all, depending on the facts and how it was written up,” a retired FBI agent, Scott Curtis, tells the Sun.He adds: “This isn’t television where everything is portrayed as being seamless. The reality is that some information gets lost in the shuffle.”

Gunman’s Path Raises Alarms About Federal Security Breakdown at Correspondents’ Dinner

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