Would-Be Trump Assassin Ranted He Could Have Smuggled Machine Gun Into Washington Hilton: ‘No One Would Have Noticed’

The man accused of storming into the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner while armed with guns and knives in an attempt to assassinate President Trump ranted about the Washington Hilton’s security “deficiencies” and meticulously researched both the event and the president’s movements leading up to the failed attack, according to new court records. In a letter-slash-manifesto sent to relatives, the defendant, Cole Tomas Allen, 31, wrote that he checked into the Washington Hilton hotel on April 24, one day before the attack, “with multiple weapons and not a single person there considers the possibility I could be a threat,” according to the government memorandum filed Wednesday.Mr. Allen, a tutor and amateur video game designer from Torrance, California, added that “if I was an Iranian agent, instead of an American citizen, I could have brought a damn Ma Deuce in here and no one would have noticed shit.” “Ma Deuce” is a nickname for an M2 .50 caliber heavy machine gun.Mr. Allen is accused of sprinting through one of the magnetometers at a U.S. Secret Service checkpoint inside the hotel while holding a 12-gauge shotgun and firing it while heading towards the stairs to the ballroom, whereMr. Trump and members of his cabinet were seated during the Correspondents’ Dinner. A Secret Service officer fired his weapon five times in the direction of Mr. Allen but did not strike him, according to court papers. Mr. Allen was restrained by several officers and arrested after falling to the ground. In addition to the shotgun, law enforcement recovered a handgun, ammunition, two knives, four daggers, needle-nose pliers, wire cutters, and a Samsung cellphone, according to court papers.In his “Apology and Explanation” letter, which he scheduled to send out automatically at 8:30 p.m., just minutes before his failed assassination attempt, Mr. Allen apologized to his parents and “everyone whose trust I abused” and justified his attack by adding “I was no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes,” alluding to Mr. Trump and his administration. He also listed out his “rules of engagement”, which named “Administration officials (not including Mr. Patel)” as targets, “prioritized from highest to lowest,” while naming Secret Service agents as targets “only if necessary, and to be incapacitated non-lethally if possible.” “I hope they’re wearing body armor because center mass with shotguns messes up people who *aren’t*,” he wrote in his letter. He also said hotel security and Capitol Police were not targets “unless they shoot at me,” while sparing hotel employees and guests. Why FBI Director Kash Patel was specifically named in the letter remains unclear, other than it may have been due to his “specific intent not to target law enforcement,” a person close to the investigation tells the Sun. Mr. Patel was an unexpected guest at the Correspondents’ Dinner, and it wasn’t immediately clear whether Mr. Allen knew of his attendance plans prior to the attack. In the weeks leading up to the attack, Mr. Allen conducted online searches of the White House Correspondents’ Association gala and researched its schedule and expected attendees. He traveled by Amtrak train from Los Angeles to Chicago, eventually arriving in Washington, D.C. on April 24, where he checked into the Washington Hilton later that same day. Along his travels, Mr. Allen wrote his observations on his phone, remarking that “Chicago is cool” and that the woods in Pennsylvania “look like vast fairy lands with tiny trickling creeks in spring,” according to court documents.Just before Saturday’s attack, Mr. Cole used his cellphone to follow Mr. Trump’s real-time schedule on the CivicTracker website and snapped pictures of himself standing in front of a mirror. Pictures in court filings showed a smirking Mr. Allen standing in front of a mirror dressed in a black dress shirt, red tie, and wearing a holster holding his knives and spare ammunition.After his attack, authorities recovered more knives, ammunition, rolls of tape, and a “half facepiece respirator” from his hotel room. A search of his parents’ home in Torrance, California, where Mr. Allen lived, recovered more weapons.A detention hearing for Mr. Allen is set for Thursday in U.S. District Court in Washington. 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.

Would-Be Trump Assassin Ranted He Could Have Smuggled Machine Gun Into Washington Hilton: ‘No One Would Have Noticed’

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