DOJ builds case against WH Correspondents' Association Dinner shooting suspect ahead of arraignment
Federal officials are working to build a case against Cole Allen, a 31-year-old California man accused of opening fire at the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner in Washington, D.C., on Saturday night. Authorities have said it appeared Allen was intent on targeting Trump administration officials.
Shooting suspect’s arraignment will likely happen in early afternoon, source tells Fox
The suspect charged in the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner shooting will likely make his first appearance in federal court on Monday in the early afternoon, a source inside the courthouse told Fox News.
Fox News correspondent David Spunt reported on the potential timing during “America’s Newsroom,” noting that an official time has yet to be provided.
“DOJ officials are certainly expecting this suspect to be in this federal court building behind me today,” Spunt said during the report. “We expect this to be a relatively short first appearance before a magistrate judge.”
Spunt then reported on what details Fox News has learned so far about the suspect and investigation.
“We know that he has been under heavy lock up and heavy security since he was taken into custody Saturday night at the Washington Hilton,” Spunt reported. “And we are told via law enforcement sources that at first he was talkative and cooperating, telling his side of the story a little bit.”
“We'll perhaps see what he had to say in the court paperwork, but then we're told that that went down to a trickle and he stopped talking and has not been talking much since,” Spunt continued.
Trump releasing video of the suspect helps tamp down on conspiracy theories, Rubio says
President Donald Trump showed “a lot of leadership” and a commitment to transparency following the shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner by releasing the surveillance video of the suspect to push back on “fools” spinning conspiracy theories about the incident, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told Fox News.
Rubio told Fox News chief foreign correspondent Trey Yingst in an interview that aired Monday that he believes Trump’s interest in transparency surrounding the case is “admirable.”
“There were a couple of people that felt like maybe we shouldn't put the video out, because it's an active investigation, and I don't think this endangers the active investigation,” Rubio said. “I thought for the president, his belief that it should be immediately available to the American people shows how committed he is to transparency.”
“It also helps tamp down, you know, fools that are out there talking about conspiracy theories and false flags and all this craziness,” Rubio added.
Rubio said Trump’s decision to hold a press conference at the White House in the immediate wake of the shooting “really showed a lot of leadership” and helped “calm the nation down.”
With three failed attempted assassinations on the president’s life, Rubio added that neither Trump nor his Cabinet will be intimidated.
“We've seen that this president has now been the target of three separate assassination attempts, including, obviously, Butler, but also what happened in Palm Beach,” Rubio said. “So but by the same token, you can't allow that to affect your work. Like how do these people win? How do these threats succeed? They succeed when they intimidate you into hiding or intimidate you into not going certain places or doing certain things, and the president's not going to allow it.”
Who is Cole Tomas Allen? What we know about the alleged WHCA Dinner shooter
The man accused of opening fire at the Washington Hilton Hotel during the White House Correspondents' Dinner has been identified as Cole Allen, 31, a computer scientist from Torrance, California who went from designing first-person shooter games to becoming an alleged shooter himself.
According to his LinkedIn profile and online records, Allen’s life and career trace an accomplished path as a computer scientist, engineer and independent game developer, even building a shooter role-playing game called "First Law."
In September 2013, according to his online profile, he enrolled in the highly competitive California Institute of Technology, known as CalTech, to pursue a BS in mechanical engineering, graduating in 2017. CalTech confirmed to Fox News Digital that a student named Cole Allen graduated from the school in 2017.
In the summer of 2014, he wrote that he landed another competitive spot as a summer undergraduate research student fellow at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where he said he contributed to astrophysics research.
That summer, his profile says, he created "First Law," a physics-based role-playing shooter game based on realistic two-dimensional space combat. At CalTech, he also built offensive and defensive robotic systems, according to his LinkedIn profile.
He later made "Bohrdom," a complex 2-D physics-based video game that he described as a "combination of a racing game with a bullet hell as experienced by self-propelled pinballs," released on the popular Steam gaming platform, according to his profile.
This is an excerpt from an article by Fox News Digital’s Peter D’Abrosca and Asra Q. Nomani.
Melania Trump calls for ABC to ‘take a stand’ against Kimmel over ‘hateful and violent rhetoric'
First lady Melania Trump called for ABC to "take a stand" against Jimmy Kimmel and his "hateful" language on Monday after the liberal late-night host referred to her as "an expectant widow" days before the White House Correspondents’ Dinner was interrupted by a suspected attempted assassin.
"Kimmel’s hateful and violent rhetoric is intended to divide our country. His monologue about my family isn’t comedy- his words are corrosive and deepens the political sickness within America," Melania Trump posted on X.
"People like Kimmel shouldn’t have the opportunity to enter our homes each evening to spread hate. A coward, Kimmel hides behind ABC because he knows the network will keep running cover to protect him. Enough is enough," the first lady continued. "It is time for ABC to take a stand. How many times will ABC’s leadership enable Kimmel’s atrocious behavior at the expense of our community."
Kimmel had mocked President Donald Trump and his wife in a White House Correspondents' Dinner parody last week, calling her "an expectant widow" and joking about her marriage.
"Our first lady, Melania, is here. Look at Melania, so beautiful. Mrs. Trump, you have a glow like an expectant widow," Kimmel said in his parody of the event on Thursday.
The joke didn't age well after authorities say 31-year-old Cole Allen of Torrance, Calif., rushed a Secret Service checkpoint at the Washington Hilton on Saturday, armed with multiple weapons, and opened fire, striking a Secret Service agent. The officer survived and Allen was taken into custody.
This is an excerpt from an article by Fox News Digital’s Brian Flood.
Obama sets internet ablaze with 'sick' reaction to the 'motive' of WHCA Dinner shooter
Former President Barack Obama sparked an online firestorm over the weekend after his X post discussing the "motive" of the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner shooter went viral.
"Although we don’t yet have the details about the motives behind last night's shooting at the White House Correspondents Dinner, it’s incumbent upon all us to reject the idea that violence has any place in our democracy," Obama posted on X on Sunday evening, roughly 24 hours after President Trump and top officials were whisked out of the Washington Hilton Hotel when shots rang out from a man who stormed security during the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner.
"It’s also a sobering reminder of the courage and sacrifice that the U.S. Secret Service Agents show every day. I’m grateful to them — and thankful that the agent who was shot is going to be okay."
Obama’s post has been viewed nearly 52 million times and sparked outrage from conservatives, who pointed to a manifesto left by the shooter and other details of the attack that they say show the motive was to harm Trump and his Cabinet.
This is an excerpt from an article by Fox News Digital's Andrew Mark Miller and Peter Pinedo.
Trump 'needs greater protection,' security seemed 'a little lax,' Johnson says
President Donald Trump will need greater protection after the shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner, where security appeared to be “a little lax," House Speaker Mike Johnson told Fox News on Monday morning.
Johnson described the security layout from his perspective on “America’s Newsroom.”
“I can tell you from a layman's perspective, it did look a little lax in terms of, as everyone's now noted, getting into the building,” Johnson said. “Now, we all came in — Cabinet secretaries of government officials with their own details — we come in the back, so I didn't see the magnetometers and all that, but it doesn't sound like it was sufficient.”
Johnson said that after three failed assassination attempts on Trump, “this can’t go on.”
“He's the most attacked, maligned political figure in history,” Johnson said. “He's very resilient, but he needs greater protection. And I think there's going to be a reevaluation, a very close reevaluation of how we handle these large events.”
Johnson added that House Oversight Committee chairman James Comer has already announced a review of the incident and a hearing with Secret Service to see if lawmakers can do, such as funding or something else.
When asked when the review and hearing could take place, Johnson said “soon,” later adding he expects it to happen “within the next couple of weeks.”
Feds will handle WHCA Dinner security 'entirely differently' next time, Patel says
Federal authorities will handle security at the next White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner “entirely differently,” according to FBI Director Kash Patel.
Patel told “FOX & Friends” on Monday morning that the FBI will provide input to a future security plan as President Donald Trump hopes to attend a rescheduled dinner within the next month.
“You heard the president say on Saturday night that we're going to do this again in short order, maybe in 30 days or so, and we're going to be ready for that,” Patel said. “The security posture, I imagine, is going to be completely different.”
The FBI director said he will work with the White House, Department of Homeland Security, U.S. Secret Service and D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department ahead of the next event.
“The FBI will be fully resourced for that event to assist in the security, and we will provide our input,” he said.
“That's the great thing about having this law enforcement team,” Patel continued. “I can call [DHS Secretary] Markwayne [Mullin] and the White House and the interagency and say, ‘Hey, we got to do a couple of things differently,' and we're already talking about it. And that's the good thing. And we're going to be better postured for the next event.”
FBI director says answers about shooting suspect coming: ‘A pretty quick turnaround’
FBI Director Kash Patel told “FOX & Friends” that investigators will soon release answers to questions surrounding the suspect in the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner shooting.
Patel said that investigators have worked tirelessly to answer questions about the suspect ahead of his arraignment Monday, calling it “a pretty quick turnaround, if not maybe the fastest for something of this magnitude.”
“We're going to be able to present to the world in less than 36 hours almost, exactly what happened. This individual's entire background, entire background, who he knew, where he lived, who he was talking to, everything about the firearms, everything about the ballistics,” Patel said.
When “FOX & Friends” co-anchor Lawrence Jones asked if the FBI director could speak about the suspect’s profile, whether he was on the FBI’s radar prior to the shooting and if the feds were aware of the suspect’s alleged social media posts, Patel said he those answers will be in the criminal complaint.
“All those questions will be answered in the complaint,” Patel said. “The criminal complaint that's being presented. I just can't get ahead of my partners, the Department of Justice, and especially can't get ahead of the federal magistrate that it's being presented to. But we have answered all those questions, and that's what we've been working towards.”
Congress unlikely to create special task force for dinner shooting, Fox News is told
We have heard relatively little from Capitol Hill about any sort of inquest into what went wrong and led to the assassination attempt Saturday night.
The House Oversight Committee has demanded a Secret Service briefing. But there are muted demands for hearings or to haul in various officials for testimony depositions.
Contrast this to the July, 2024 assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania.
Within days, the House created a special task force to probe what went wrong in Butler.
There were hearings within a couple of weeks.
But Fox is told there may not be as much of that this time.
First of all, the system MOSTLY worked. That said, there are lots of questions about the location of security perimeters, whether the entire hotel should have been locked down, et al.
But the biggest impediment may be a political one:
A major move by House committees to dig deeper could trigger a push by Democrats — and some Republicans — to subpoena FBI Director Kash Patel and former Attorney General Pam Bondi. Even former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.
The House Oversight Committee has demonstrated a ferocious appetite to issue bipartisan subpoenaes over the past year — mostly connected to the Epstein inquiry.
So it’s unclear just how deep lawmakers are willing to dig after this episode. And Fox has asked multiple times if there could be the creation of a special panel to investigate Saturday night, ala Butler. But there’s no indication yet that lawmakers are ready to go in that direction.
Accused WHCA Dinner shooter to be arraigned Monday
The man accused of opening fire at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner in Washington, D.C., on Saturday is expected to be arraigned on Monday, U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro wrote on X late Sunday.
“It is clear that this individual was intent on doing as much harm as he could,” the post read. “Thank God for our law enforcement who acted so quickly to prevent what could have been a horrific event.”
Authorities have identified Cole Allen, 31, as the suspect arrested in the shooting that happened at the Washington Hilton hotel as President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance and other senior Cabinet officials were attending the media dinner.
Pirro said during a press conference that the suspect will face charges including using a firearm during a crime of violence and assault on a federal officer using a dangerous weapon. She added that more charges are expected.
WHCA Dinner attendee exposes major security lapses in firsthand pre-attack account
An attendee who reportedly had the hotel room next to Cole Allen recalled what he described as alarming security lapses in the hours before Allen allegedly opened fire outside the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner attended by President Donald Trump on Saturday.
Daily Beast editor Hugh Dougherty said the apparent breaches explain how the suspect may have been able to slip a disassembled long gun past authorities.
“How on earth could someone with a disassembled long gun check into a room at a hotel where the president was going to speak? I can answer that: Nobody even looked at my luggage on Friday afternoon,” he said, adding that his colleague’s belongings also went unchecked as late as 5 p.m. Saturday.
“No magnometers, no hand checks, no I.D. checks. Nothing.”
Dougherty added that he was able to move freely between the ground floor and his room on the 10th floor of the Washington Hilton without anyone stopping him, screening him, or verifying his credentials — a significant lapse that may have allowed the suspect to move through the building before allegedly assembling the gun outside the press dinner.
“To get down from my room to the dinner, I simply flashed my ticket,” Dougherty said. “It could have been a photocopy.”
He also said he sent a copy of his colleague’s ticket to help them gain access to the hotel interior up to the magnetometers — the same checkpoints Allen allegedly had to sprint past before being tackled by security.
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