U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro released video on Thursday showing a would-be Trump assassin shooting a Secret Service agent during an attempted attack at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.
Pirro shared roughly five minutes of security footage from the Washington Hilton in an X post late Thursday afternoon, adding in a caption, “Today, we are releasing video already provided to U.S. District Court showing Cole Allen shoot a U.S. Secret Service officer during his attempt to assassinate the President at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. There is no evidence the shooting was the result of friendly fire. The video also shows Allen casing the area in the Hilton Hotel the day before the attack. My office along with the @FBI will continue this extensive investigation to bring Cole Allen to justice.”
In the video, as Pirro noted, Allen was seen walking around the hotel a day prior to the event to get the lay of the land. In the final moments of the footage, he could be seen charging toward Secret Service agents at a security checkpoint, then firing his weapon at them. They all responded as he charged, turning and drawing on Allen as he passed by them.
Allen was apprehended with a shotgun, a handgun, and several knives — and in a manifesto delivered to family members by email just prior to the shooting, he declared his intention to kill President Donald Trump and as many members of the administration as possible. He noted that he was not intentionally targeting hotel staff or FBI Director Kash Patel, but acknowledged his willingness to kill everyone in the room if it came to that.
Allen’s attorney has since argued that his client is “not a danger” to anyone because the weapons he chose were not typical of the “modern-day mass shooting.”
