Security at correspondents' dinner worked as intended, say experts

By Devlin Barrett, Eileen Sullivan and Chelsia Rose Marcius

 

The gunman who sprinted through a security checkpoint on Saturday night at the Washington Hilton believed that the Secret Service was poorly prepared to guard top administration officials against him, according to writing he left behind. Agents, in turn, stopped him in a matter of seconds.

 

The episode raised fresh questions about whether the Secret Service was sufficiently prepared to protect the president in an age of rising threats and spasms of political violence. But officials insisted that the security measures had worked as intended, pointing to the fact that the suspect never made it into the hotel ballroom where President Trump and hundreds of journalists were gathered for the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner.

 

 

“The system worked,” Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, said in an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday, recounting how the suspect made it only feet past the security perimeter.

 

The suspect’s writing was shared with The New York Times by two law enforcement officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to disclose the information.

 

Even as some politicians and pundits contended on Sunday that security should have been tighter and that the suspect should never have gotten that close, former law enforcement officials said in interviews that the appropriate safeguards appeared to have been in place.

 

“From experience, this could have been a massacre,” said Paul Eckloff, who served on President Trump’s security detail during his first term. “It wasn’t, because armed, trained professionals stood between the attacker and a ballroom full of people. The question is not, how did he get close? The question people should be asking is, why is everyone alive? It’s because the security plan worked.” 

 

In his writing, the suspect, Cole Tomas Allen, expressed surprise that he was able to check into the hotel a day before the event with a shotgun, a handgun and a knife, presumably in his luggage.

 

Anthony Guglielmi, a spokesman for the Secret Service, said that the agency designs a specific security plan for each event. “These measures are rigorously tested during the advance process and were critical in mitigating the threat and preventing significant harm,” he said.

 

The perimeter at the event had multiple layers, and not all are obvious to people in the venue, which is intentional. In this instance, the metal detectors formed the outer perimeter of the secure area. Just past the screening, law enforcement officers were posted to make sure no one who should not proceed to the ballroom got through. Inside the ballroom, Secret Service counterassault teams were positioned to respond should something happen, according to a law enforcement official briefed on the plan who was not authorized to speak about it publicly. And some agents were dressed as waiters to blend in as they looked around the room.

 

“You had a person try to gain entrance from a dirty area, an unsecure area, into a secure area, and he was apprehended before he could actually enter into the event,” said Michael R. Centrella, a former assistant director of the Secret Service. “So the layer of protection, the way the security plan was laid out, the Secret Service did exactly how the plan should go, and the individual was apprehended before ever gaining entrance.”

 

The president has vowed to hold the event again in the next month, and already some have questioned whether the security perimeter for that gathering should be pushed farther out. In practice, that would mean that if someone again tried to rush past agents, that confrontation would happen outside the building, not inside it. Eckloff said that making the perimeter too large could have the unintended effect of diluting security presence where it is most needed.

 

The Washington Hilton, where the gala dinner has long been held, is a difficult venue for the Secret Service to secure because it is so large, a public space and so many people come and go — to and from their rooms and the hotel itself. The makeup of the event raises the stakes because it can include the entire line of succession to the presidency in one spot. (The third in line to succeed the president, Senator Chuck Grassley, Republican of Iowa and the president pro tempore of the Senate, was not at the dinner on Saturday night.)

 

In his writings, the suspect noted that he was able to take guns into the hotel and speculated that an Iranian terrorist with more dangerous weapons would have been able to inflict huge damage.

 

Video captured the fear and confusion inside the hotel ballroom on Saturday night as Secret Service agents rushed to the dais to protect Trump and Vice President JD Vance. The video shows the security detail for Vance, which is smaller than the president’s, ferrying him off the dais toward safety about 10 seconds before the president’s. Eckloff said the disparity reflected, in part, the differences in protective detail, including the fact that the two men are staffed by personnel with slightly different responsibilities.

 

“When you have multiple protectees, especially so many in the line of succession of the president, obviously it’s very complicated and real-life events become messy,” Eckloff said.

 

When it comes to rushing someone offstage, age is also a consideration. Trump is 79, and Vance is 41.

 

“Sometimes moving that person or those three people immediately is a mistake in the moment,” Eckloff said, adding that depending on the circumstances, a security detail could be moving toward danger instead of away from it.

 

“I would argue, it was within 10 seconds that the decision was made to move him,” Eckloff said of the president. That probably felt like an hour inside the room, he said, but a number of tactical decisions have to be made in an instant, including whether to hunker down and shield in place behind the table to determine whether anyone is firing at the dais.

 

Since July 2024, when the Secret Service failed to secure a rooftop at a rally in Butler, Pa., where a gunman fired eight shots at Trump, the agency has faced tough questions about its competency.

 

Security experts viewed that assassination attempt during the election campaign as a clear failure by the agency to prepare and secure the area, given how close the 20-year-old gunman came to killing Trump. Poor communication between the local police and the Secret Service allowed the gunman to climb onto the roof of a nearby building and fire a bullet that grazed the president’s ear. A Secret Service sniper shot and killed the gunman.

 

It was the first assassination attempt against a former or current president since 1981. While Trump suffered a minor injury, one person attending the rally was killed and two others were injured. A shake-up in leadership at the agency followed, and some aspects of presidential security were redesigned.

 

“We saw failure in Butler. We saw excellence of emergency reaction, but the setup, the execution and the shots fired were a failure,” said Eckloff, who said it would be a mistake to push the security perimeter outside the hotel the next time the event is held. “It’s not about making a bigger perimeter,” he said. “It’s about making the response faster and more precise.”

 

Centrella said that for the Secret Service, success typically looked as if little happened.

 

“Last night, success looked like a dangerous situation being contained before it became a tragedy,” he said.