Cole Tomas Allen case reveals Secret Service failures at D.C. gala

According to Acting Atty. Gen. Todd Blanche and other senior administration officials, the U.S. Secret Service did an excellent job protecting President Trump and cabinet members from the shooter who breached the White House Correspondents Association. dinner Saturday.

“This horrific act was stopped thanks to the courage and professionalism of law enforcement — officers who responded without hesitation and did their job as they were trained to do,” Blanche said Monday.

However, according to a detailed report filed Wednesday by federal prosecutors in the criminal case against suspect Cole Tomas Allen, the performance of the nation’s top protective agency was marred by inattention and misfires and saved by “extraordinary luck” and the shooter’s fall to the ground.

“The accused, armed with a 12-gauge shotgun, a .38-caliber pistol, two knives, four daggers and enough ammunition to kill dozens of people, was apprehended by [Secret Service] “The officers were within yards of the ballroom where his primary target was located, along with other Cabinet members,” prosecutors wrote Wednesday, in a filing arguing for Allen to be kept in custody pending trial on a charge of attempting to kill the president and two firearms charges.

Contradicting an earlier claim by Blanche that officers “quickly attacked and arrested” Allen, prosecutors wrote that the 31-year-old tutor from Torrance simply “fell to the ground” after passing a team of officers just two flights of open stairs from the ballroom.

They wrote that an officer shot Allen five times, but never hit him.

The same officer saw Allen firing his shotgun “in the direction of the stairs leading to the ballroom,” prosecutors wrote, and officers later discovered “one spent round in the barrel and eight unfired rounds in the magazine tube.”

Prosecutors have said nothing about the Secret Service officer who Blanche said was shot in his body armor during the incident — adding to speculation that the officer may have been shot not by Allen, but by a fellow officer, or not at all.

Agency already criticized

Overall, the court filing further shed light on a chaotic Secret Service response that appeared flawed from the start, including in a video released by Trump shortly after the incident in which agents appeared to idle around a clear entrance as Allen ran past them.

That adds to concerns voiced by law enforcement, security experts and members of Congress over the performance of an agency that has repeatedly been called for improvement after previous attempts on Trump’s life. At a 2024 campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, a gunman fired a bullet that grazed Trump’s ear, and that same year, another assailant prepared to shoot him from the unsecured perimeter of a Florida golf course.

Robert D’Amico, former deputy chief of operations for the FBI’s hostage rescue teams and now a security consultant, said the security failures he saw in the Secret Service’s preparation for Saturday’s dinner — including the failure to set up basic barriers to prevent people from rushing into the secure area — were staggering, especially given past threats and the fact that the country is at war with Iran.

“Is this for a person like Trump, who has already made two assassination attempts and is at war with Iran, has terrorist training and proxies, and you still don’t have the basics?” D’Amico said. “It’s unfathomable.”

Other concerns have been expressed by members of Congress, including Republicans.

The House Oversight Committee requested a briefing from the Secret Service, and Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) requested a hearing before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, which also investigated the Butler incident.

In a letter requesting the hearing, Hawley said the latest incident “raises questions about presidential security arrangements, potential resource requirements, and the degree of adoption of reforms previously proposed by Congress.”

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) told Fox News that, from a “layman’s perspective,” security for the event “seemed a little lax in terms of access to the building” and that “doesn’t seem like enough.”

Secret Service Director Sean M. Curran visited Capitol Hill in recent days to brief lawmakers.

He told CBS News that officers did a “great job” but also that the incident was still under investigation. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said White House chief of staff Susie Wiles would lead discussions on possible updates to the Secret Service’s plans to secure the president.

Fear of more serious threats

Blanche argued that the proof of the Secret Service’s effectiveness at the press gala lay in the outcome: Allen was arrested, Trump and other officials remained unharmed, and no one was killed, despite Allen’s alleged intent.

However, the concerns raised relate as much to the vulnerabilities exposed as to those exploited.

Because the dinner was not designated as a major “special national security event” — such as a political convention — there were no trained counterattack agents on standby to prevent a breach or to shoot a person with a weapon, officials said.

Law enforcement experts said this was clearly a mistake given that many top officials — Trump, Johnson, Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, among others — were in the room.

Such a gathering could have been targeted by foreign adversaries or others with far more experience, less respect for human life and far greater firepower than Allen, experts said.

“Most of my military friends all say the same thing,” said D’Amico, who is also a former U.S. Marine infantry platoon commander. “If you had a team of three or four [gunmen]they would have arrived at [Trump].’”

In the initial criminal complaint against Allen, prosecutors included the text of an email Allen sent to his family as he prepared to enter the security perimeter, in which he allegedly wrote that he chose to use buckshot in order to “minimize casualties” and prevent bystanders from being injured by more powerful bullets penetrating the walls.

He also reportedly wrote that he was willing to “go through almost everyone” at the event to reach senior administration officials, but that guests and hotel staff were “not targets at all.”

In Wednesday’s filing, prosecutors describe Allen’s actions as “premeditated, violent and calculated to cause death,” and say he was “loaded with weapons” while violating security. But none of those weapons included assault rifles that can fire multiple bullets in rapid succession and have been used to kill civilians in mass shootings across the country for years.

The filing portrayed Allen — a Caltech graduate and high school tutor — not as a trained tactical expert, but as an ideologue who spent part of his Amtrak trip from California to Washington waxing poetic about the landscape around him, describing the Pennsylvania woods as “vast fairy lands filled with tiny streams trickling in the spring.”

It could have been worse

D’Amico said he and other Marines learned early on in Iraq that entrances to secure locations had to be designed in a “serpentine” fashion, forcing anyone approaching to move more slowly through the area and giving security officers more time to assess their intentions. And at an event the size of a correspondents’ dinner, with so many senior officials gathered in a public hotel, one would want to make entry “even more difficult.”

And yet no barriers appeared to be in place at the event, he said — something anyone trained on more than Allen could have capitalized on.

“If they had just managed to put together a team of three or four people who were coordinated and trained, there would have been absolute penetration into the ballroom,” D’Amico said. “It would have been a shootout.”

Allen himself questioned security at the event, according to court records, allegedly writing that he entered the Washington Hilton with several weapons and that no one considered “the possibility that I might be a threat.”

He wrote that if he “had been an Iranian agent, instead of an American citizen,” he “could have brought a damn Ma Deuce here and no one would have noticed” – referring to a powerful machine gun.

“It’s fortunate he was only armed with what he had,” said Ed Obayashi, a California law enforcement expert on use of force.