New video shows accused gunman trying to storm White House press dinner as gunfire erupts – as it happened | Trump administration
Prosecutors release video of accused gunman Cole Allen trying to storm White House Correspondents’ dinner
Amid questions about whether or not Cole Allen, who is accused of trying to storm the White House Correspondent’s dinner on Saturday to kill Donald Trump, fired his weapon before being subdued, the top federal prosecutor in Washington DC, Jeanine Pirro released edited security-camera video of the incident in a social media post.
In a caption, Pirro said that the video showed Allen casing the hotel location the night before, and then shooting first as he rushed through a metal detector at a checkpoint.
The video, which is slowed down and annotated at certain points, was submitted as evidence on Thursday to the US district court where Allen was charged. It includes no audio.
While the video does show four muzzles flashes from the agent’s gun as he fired at Allen, it was not immediately clear that it does show Allen discharging his weapon after he pointed it at the agent.
The images suggest that Allen, who charged the checkpoint as officers were in the process of removing at least one of the two magnetometers used for screening guests, could have shot up to a dozen unsuspecting officers had they been his targets.
The video was posted shortly after Sean Curran, the director of the US Secret Service, told Pirro’s former employer, Fox News that Allen was stopped not by secret service gunfire, but by a box used to transport a metal detector, which he tripped over as he ran through a checkpoint outside the venue.
Curran confirmed that Allen was was not hit by any of the five shots fired at him by a secret service agent.
“It appears that the suspect hit his knee, while being engaged by the officer, on one of our magnetometer boxes, and began to fall to the ground,” Curran said.
Curran also reiterated the government’s claim that Allen fired first, hitting the agent who returned fire, but that contention has been challenged by the public defenders acting on Allen’s behalf and by a Washington Post video analysis of security-camera footage, which documented the firing of just four shots, all by the secret service agent.
In a letter to the federal prosecutors who brought charges against Allen, the public defenders noted that the acting attorney general Todd Blanche suggested that the government was still working to produce ballistic evidence that the secret service agent, identified by the initials VG, had been shot by Allen.
“We noticed that you did not describe the shotgun ammunition in your detention memorandum. We request that you provide a description of the ammunition,” they added. “Because some of Acting AG Blanche’s statements indicate that the recovered ballistics evidence is inconsistent with aspects of the government’s theory, evidence collected by the government and/or statements made by witnesses, we are entitled to this information prior to the detention hearing.”
The public defenders then asked for the government to provide any evidence it might have that cast doubt on the claim that Allen did fire at the secret service officer.
“Please provide the following information as it relates to the alleged shooting of the Secret Service Officer V.G.”, the wrote:
• Any information in law enforcement’s possession that Mr. Allen did not shoot V.G.
• Any information in law enforcement’s possession that Mr. Allen did not fire a shot at
or in the general direction of V.G.
• Any video, including any video enhanced by law enforcement that reveals footage that is inconsistent with the government’s theory that Mr. Allen fired the shotgun
In reply to that letter, the federal prosecutors wrote that their investigation was ongoing, but suggested they did, indeed, have evidence that Allen fired his weapon.
With respect to your specific requests for information, the government’s investigation is ongoing and its analysis of the crime scene evidence and recovered ballistics evidence is not yet complete.
The evidence gathered and analyzed to date establishes that your client fired his Mossberg 12-gauge pump-action shotgun at least one time as he ran past the magnetometers on the Terrace Level of the Washington Hilton hotel on April 25, 2026. When that weapon was recovered it had one spent cartridge case in the chamber which has been identified as having been fired in the Mossberg shotgun.
The government’s preliminary ballistics and video analyses show that your client fired his shotgun in the direction of USSS Officer V.G., which Officer V.G. observed. Additionally, at least one fragment was recovered from the crime scene that was physically consistent with a single buckshot pellet; that fragment was recovered from a location at the scene consistent with your client firing his shotgun in the direction of Officer V.G. The government is aware of no physical evidence, digital video evidence, or witness statements that are inconsistent with the theory that your client fired his shotgun in the direction of Officer V.G., or that Officer V.G. was indeed shot once in the chest while wearing a ballistic vest. The government notes that the analysis of the ballistic vest and related materials is ongoing and not yet complete.
Key events
Closing summary
This concludes our live coverage of the second Trump administration for the day. Here’s the latest:
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Amid questions about whether or not Cole Allen, who is accused of trying to storm the White House Correspondent’s dinner on Saturday to kill Donald Trump, fired his weapon before being subdued, the top federal prosecutor in Washington DC, Jeanine Pirro released edited security-camera video of the incident. While the video does show four muzzles flashes from the agent’s gun as he fired at Allen, it was not immediately clear that it does show Allen discharging his weapon after he pointed it at the agent.
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Sean Curran, the director of the US Secret Service, told Pirro’s former employer, Fox News that Allen was stopped not by secret service gunfire, but by a box used to transport a metal detector, which he tripped over.
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The US Congress has passed a 45-day extension of a law that grants US intelligence agencies warrantless spying powers.
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US defense secretary Pete Hegseth’s attempt to put a positive spin on the ongoing US war on Iran was immediately challenged, first by the ranking Democrat on the armed services committee, senator Jack Reed, who lambasted his “dangerously exaggerated” claims, and then by a protester who shouted, “you’re a war criminal!”
Maga White House correspondents gush over Trump’s new black granite walkway he claims will last for a million years
The impact of the Trump White House seizing control last year over which news outlets are allowed to cover his Oval Office open-mic sessions was on full display Thursday, when the president responded to a rightwing correspondent’s praise for the new black granite walkway he installed in the colonnade outside by stopping the press pack from leaving, so he could deliver a hymn of praise to his own design sense.
As the president wrapped up the event, after boasting about the strikes on Iran’s nuclear enrichment facility he ordered last year, Sarah Roderick-Fitch of the rightwing Center Square told him, “the tile looks beautiful, Mr President; the tile looks gorgeous.”
Trump immediately held up his hands to ask the rest of the reporters and Republican lawmakers in the room: “How do you like the new floor?”
He then launched into a lengthy monologue on his skills as a master builder.
“What I do best is build. That’s what I do best. I think, I say to people, ‘Am I a better builder or politician?’ And most of them say, ‘Politician’, but that’s okay. What I do best is I build. The ballroom will be just like that.
So I went out and I have a special black granite. Granite is the most powerful stone there is. Marble is much weaker than granite. I like marble more because marble can be more beautiful, but it’s a much weaker stone. When you look at gravesites and you look at a marble plaque a hundred years old, you’ll see oftentimes you can almost not read it. When you look at a granite plaque a hundred years old, it looks like it just got put there yesterday. You know that’s a test.
But we have the finest granite anyone’s ever seen. It’s called flawless granite. There’s very little of it, and I replaced broken slate that was put here many years ago. I saved the ramp because it’s in honor of FDR. FDR, right out there. He had that built as a ramp. They said, ‘Oh, sir, we’ll straighten it.’ I said, ‘No, you have to leave the ramp.’ It was built, that ramp was built for FDR with the wheelchair, because you know it’s not, it’s a pretty good slope. A lot of people say, ‘Why is it a ramp?’ I say, ‘because of FDR.’ They say, ‘Ah, I get it.’ But we saved that.
But we replaced the broken slate. And it’s slate, by the way, is meant for a roof, it’s not meant for a sidewalk. And we replaced it with granite, the highest grade granite, it’s valued at, you know, they value stones in terms of, that’s valued at 1 million plus. That means 1 million plus years. A marble will oftentimes be valued at 200 years, 300 years. This gives you a little lesson in stones. Somebody will say he went off on a tangent.”
The president then instructed his aides to have the reporters, many of whom were from partisan, pro-Trump outlets, leave through the colonnade outside, so they could see the granite.
That led to the spectacle of many of them filming themselves gushing over the granite, and repeating Trump’s claim that it was expected to last over a million years and he had not even walked on it yet.
“It’s rated to a million years” Peter Doocy of Fox News told his social media followers.
In the background, Brian Glenn, of the even more pro-Trump Real America’s Voice, could be heard shouting into his own phone that he had been granted “an exclusive look at this special flooring, this granite flooring that has a million year rating.”
Behind them, Roderick-Fitch, recorded her own gushing appraisal of the granite. “Wow!” she said. “We are the first to walk on this! This is historical!”
Daniel Baldwin of the fringe, far-right cable outlet One American News recorded his own inspection of the colonnade flooring, passing Glenn as the Maga correspondent told his social media followers: “we’re finding out that the president has not even walked on this floor yet!”
In fact, granite paving stones are expected to last more than 100 years, and, earlier on Thursday, Trump was photographed walking along the new granite floor of the colonnade to the Oval Office with an aide who was indicted along with him in the classified documents case that was dropped once he won reelection.
Minnesota’s governor, Tim Walz, to campaign for Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner
Tim Walz, the Democratic governor of Minnesota who was his parry’s nominee for vice-president in 2024, announced on Thursday that he is traveling to Maine to campaign for Graham Platner, the military veteran and oysterman who is running to unseat Republican Susan Collins in the November Senate race.
“I’ll be in Portland tomorrow with Graham Platner to kick off his campaign to retire Susan Collins,” Walz posted on Facebook. “Let’s go win this thing.”
Platner earned the backing of the Democratic party’s establishment on Thursday, after his rival, Maine governor Janet Mills, dropped out of the race, citing a shortage of money.
Despite questions over his lack of experience, past social media posts that have been called racist and sexist, his work as a private military contractor and a now-covered tattoo he claims he had for nearly 20 years before learning it was a Nazi symbol, Platner has led in the polls and won the support of progressive Democrats like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.
Baited by rightwing reporter, Trump says he would consider pulling US troops from Spain and Italy as well as Germany
During an Oval Office event on Thursday, where correspondents for partisan, rightwing outlets seemed to be competing to see who could heap the most praise on the president, Donald Trump was asked if he would consider withdrawing US troops from bases in Spain and Italy, over their unwillingness to get involved in his ruinous war on Iran.
“You’ve talked about possibly pulling some troops out of Germany, would you be considering the same thing for Spain and Italy? I mean they haven’t been exactly on board,” Sarah Roderick-Fitch of the rightwing Center Square asked Trump.
“Yeah, probably,” the president replied to the suggestion from the reporter whose outlet is run by the Franklin News Foundation, a conservative non-profit that has received substantial funding from Donors Trust, Leonard Leo’s primary dark-money vehicle, and that is part of the State Policy Network of rightwing thinktanks backed by the Koch family.
“Why shouldn’t I? Italy has not been of any help to us and Spain has been horrible, absolutely horrible,” Trump continued.
“When we needed them, they were not there, We have to remember that,” the president added.
He then seemed to immediately contradict himself. “We didn’t need any help with Iran. We had Iran, right from the first day, it was over.”
“We didn’t need their help, but to a certain extent I asked them- I didn’t need their help but I said, ‘Yeah, we’d love to have you help’, because I wanted to see if they’d do it. And they, in all cases, they said, ‘We don’t want to get involved’. And you know the amazing thing is, they use the strait of Hormuz. We don’t use it. We don’t need it,” Trump said. “You would’ve thought they would have said, ‘We would love to help you,’ but they didn’t.”
The president then again attacked the chancellor of Germany, who pointed out on Monday that “the Americans clearly have no strategy” for ending the war in Iran. In response, Trump threatened to withdraw US troops from bases in Germany.
“He criticized me for doing the whole thing with Iran. But I said, ‘Would you like to have a nuclear weapon in the hands of Iran?’ He said, ‘No I don’t.’ I said, ‘Well, then I guess I’m right.’”
Trump has repeatedly claimed that the joint US-Israeli attack on Iran was necessary to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, despite the fact that he claimed to have obliterated its uranium enrichment program with strikes last year, and US intelligence assessed that Iran had made no effort to produce a nuclear weapon since 2003.
During the same event, Brian Glenn, a correspondent for Real America’s Voice, who is engaged to former congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, asked Trump a question braided with over-the-top praise.
“I’ve described you as the Peacemaker, you’re achieving peace around the world,” Glenn said when Trump called on him. “Due to these latest policies, Big Beautiful Bill, no tax on tips, no taxes on social security, no taxes on overtime, now the Trump accounts and then the IRA accounts, can we describe you as the Wealthmaker?”
Another correspondent, for the far-right, conspiratorial cable outlet One America News, Daniel Baldwin, recited what he called a host of good news for the economy and asked Trump if he believed that this was “evidence that the Big Beautiful Tax Cuts that you signed into law last year are working and do you think that the economy is going to continue to hum?”
Prosecutors release video of accused gunman Cole Allen trying to storm White House Correspondents’ dinner
Amid questions about whether or not Cole Allen, who is accused of trying to storm the White House Correspondent’s dinner on Saturday to kill Donald Trump, fired his weapon before being subdued, the top federal prosecutor in Washington DC, Jeanine Pirro released edited security-camera video of the incident in a social media post.
In a caption, Pirro said that the video showed Allen casing the hotel location the night before, and then shooting first as he rushed through a metal detector at a checkpoint.
The video, which is slowed down and annotated at certain points, was submitted as evidence on Thursday to the US district court where Allen was charged. It includes no audio.
While the video does show four muzzles flashes from the agent’s gun as he fired at Allen, it was not immediately clear that it does show Allen discharging his weapon after he pointed it at the agent.
The images suggest that Allen, who charged the checkpoint as officers were in the process of removing at least one of the two magnetometers used for screening guests, could have shot up to a dozen unsuspecting officers had they been his targets.
The video was posted shortly after Sean Curran, the director of the US Secret Service, told Pirro’s former employer, Fox News that Allen was stopped not by secret service gunfire, but by a box used to transport a metal detector, which he tripped over as he ran through a checkpoint outside the venue.
Curran confirmed that Allen was was not hit by any of the five shots fired at him by a secret service agent.
“It appears that the suspect hit his knee, while being engaged by the officer, on one of our magnetometer boxes, and began to fall to the ground,” Curran said.
Curran also reiterated the government’s claim that Allen fired first, hitting the agent who returned fire, but that contention has been challenged by the public defenders acting on Allen’s behalf and by a Washington Post video analysis of security-camera footage, which documented the firing of just four shots, all by the secret service agent.
In a letter to the federal prosecutors who brought charges against Allen, the public defenders noted that the acting attorney general Todd Blanche suggested that the government was still working to produce ballistic evidence that the secret service agent, identified by the initials VG, had been shot by Allen.
“We noticed that you did not describe the shotgun ammunition in your detention memorandum. We request that you provide a description of the ammunition,” they added. “Because some of Acting AG Blanche’s statements indicate that the recovered ballistics evidence is inconsistent with aspects of the government’s theory, evidence collected by the government and/or statements made by witnesses, we are entitled to this information prior to the detention hearing.”
The public defenders then asked for the government to provide any evidence it might have that cast doubt on the claim that Allen did fire at the secret service officer.
“Please provide the following information as it relates to the alleged shooting of the Secret Service Officer V.G.”, the wrote:
• Any information in law enforcement’s possession that Mr. Allen did not shoot V.G.
• Any information in law enforcement’s possession that Mr. Allen did not fire a shot at
or in the general direction of V.G.
• Any video, including any video enhanced by law enforcement that reveals footage that is inconsistent with the government’s theory that Mr. Allen fired the shotgun
In reply to that letter, the federal prosecutors wrote that their investigation was ongoing, but suggested they did, indeed, have evidence that Allen fired his weapon.
With respect to your specific requests for information, the government’s investigation is ongoing and its analysis of the crime scene evidence and recovered ballistics evidence is not yet complete.
The evidence gathered and analyzed to date establishes that your client fired his Mossberg 12-gauge pump-action shotgun at least one time as he ran past the magnetometers on the Terrace Level of the Washington Hilton hotel on April 25, 2026. When that weapon was recovered it had one spent cartridge case in the chamber which has been identified as having been fired in the Mossberg shotgun.
The government’s preliminary ballistics and video analyses show that your client fired his shotgun in the direction of USSS Officer V.G., which Officer V.G. observed. Additionally, at least one fragment was recovered from the crime scene that was physically consistent with a single buckshot pellet; that fragment was recovered from a location at the scene consistent with your client firing his shotgun in the direction of Officer V.G. The government is aware of no physical evidence, digital video evidence, or witness statements that are inconsistent with the theory that your client fired his shotgun in the direction of Officer V.G., or that Officer V.G. was indeed shot once in the chest while wearing a ballistic vest. The government notes that the analysis of the ballistic vest and related materials is ongoing and not yet complete.
The White House said in a statement that Donald Trump has signed the Department of Homeland Security funding bill into law, which excludes immigration enforcement operations, bringing an end the longest government agency shutdown in history.
House passes temporary extension of Fisa warrantless spying powers
Sanya Mansoor
The US Congress has passed a 45-day extension of a law that grants US intelligence agencies warrantless spying powers.
Bitter infighting over section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in the Republican wing of Congress has repeatedly tanked conservative leaders’ plans to renew the controversial surveillance law for multiple years. The deadlock continued on Thursday, as the Republican House speaker Mike Johnson refused to include key reforms pushed by hardliners in his party and progressive Democrats.
In remarks before a final vote in the House, lawmakers opposed to a long-term extension of section 702 again called on Johnson to consider their concerns about how the surveillance program is abused to spy on Americans.
“We’re willing to give you 45 more days for us to negotiate this thing if the Speaker will actually sit down with us,” said US congressman Jamie Raskin, a Democrat from Maryland, who has rallied against an extension of the program with no changes. “We can make this happen if we’re willing to get rid of all the chaos and the pandemonium we’ve seen over the last several days and simply sit down and have a meaningful conversation and write the legislation.”
Hardline Republicans across the aisle who took issue with section 702 welcomed Raskin’s remarks as they too expressed their fears about how the program surveils Americans’ communications. “Fisa databases have been used to query political activists, members of Congress and their staff, random romantic interests of FBI agents, and we’re being told, ‘Oh, don’t worry, it’s not being abused any more,” said Thomas Massie, a Republican from Kentucky.
Hegseth testimony disrupted by Code Pink protester shouting ‘We don’t want to fight a war for Israel’
As our colleague Robert Tait reports, US defense secretary Pete Hegseth’s attempt to put a positive spin on the ongoing US war on Iran was immediately challenged, first by the ranking Democrat on the armed services committee, senator Jack Reed, who lambasted his “dangerously exaggerated” claims, and then by a protester who shouted, “you’re a war criminal!”
A Reuters photograph of the protester from the activist group Code Pink showed that he stood up in the audience behind Hegseth and held a sign reading “No War on Iran”, as a colleague recorded and Capitol Police officers quickly converged on him.
That video, recorded and posted online by fellow activists from the group Code Pink, showed that the protester shouted at Hegseth, as he being bundled away by Capitol Police officers: “You should be arrested. What you’re doing is despicable. The American people do not want to go into this war. We don’t want to fight a war for Israel!”
Code Pink co-founder Medea Benjamin also posted video of a brief interview with the protester in handcuffs outside the hearing room. “I’m being arrested because I oppose the war in Iran,” he said. We don’t want to fight this war for Israel… and we don’t want to commit war crimes.
Trump dismissed the press corps from the Oval Office, but then quickly paused their departure to ask whether the assembled journalists, many from Maga-aligned outlets, liked the new floors.
“What I do best is I build,” Trump said, before launching into a, by his own admission, “tangent” on the difference between granite and marble. Granite is stronger, but marble, in the president’s opinion, is more beautiful. He said the White House raced to complete the new granite floor in time for King Charles’s visit.
“Did he love it?” one reporter asked. “Ooh he loved it and he’s seen some nice stones,” Trump replied.
“This is a Trump renaissance,” one person told him. “We’re fixing the White House,” he agreed.
Trump was asked whether he might start wearing a bullet proof vest after the latest incident at the White House correspondents dinner.
“I don’t know if I could handle looking 20lbs heavier,” Trump quipped, drawing laughs from the room. Of the secret service agents, he said: “Some of these guys are physical specimens.”
He mused that it might be useful to wear one, but “you don’t like to do it because you’re giving into a bad element,” he said.
He was previously asked whether the shot that struck a US secret service officer during Saturday’s shooting outside the ballroom at the Washington Hilton.
“They say it was not friendly fire,” he said. “That’s what I heard.”
The officer was struck in the chest, but protected by a bulletproof vest. “He didn’t even want to go to the hospital,” Trump said, emphasizing the efficacy of the vest.
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