Federal prosecutors released nearly six minutes of security footage Thursday showing the moment a man armed with guns and knives attempted to storm the White House Correspondents' Association dinner and, according to authorities, tried to kill President Donald Trump.
US Attorney for Washington Jeanine Pirro posted the video on social media. The release came amid public questions about whose bullet struck a Secret Service officer during the chaos. Pirro said Thursday there is no evidence the officer was hit by friendly fire. The footage appears to show suspect Cole Tomas Allen run through a metal detector, point his weapon at a Secret Service agent, and then get shot at five times by that agent.
Allen was injured but was not shot during the Saturday night attack at the Washington Hilton. He appeared briefly in federal court Thursday and agreed to remain jailed while awaiting trial. He did not enter a plea.
The video begins with footage from the day before the attack, showing Allen walking back and forth down a hotel hallway and briefly looking into the gym. Security camera footage from the checkpoint shows roughly a dozen federal officers standing casually when Allen emerges from a doorway and sprints toward them. Most officers appear not to notice him until he is already on top of them. Only one officer visible in the footage had drawn his weapon before Allen passed; prosecutors say that officer is the one who was wounded and returned fire.
Court documents filed Wednesday describe Allen photographing himself in his hotel room just minutes before the attack. He was wearing an ammunition bag and a shoulder gun holster and had a sheathed knife. In a message cited by prosecutors as evidence of motive, Allen referred to himself as a "Friendly Federal Assassin" and made oblique references to grievances tied to a range of Trump administration actions.
Secret Service Director Sean Curran defended the agency's security setup in a Fox News interview, saying the attack was stopped within seconds at the outermost layer of a multi-layered security perimeter around the president. He said the distance from the metal detectors to the podium where Trump was seated was 355 feet, with two flights of stairs, a doorway and additional armed officers in between. "The site was set up perfectly," Curran said.
