The Daily Beast’s Executive Editor Hugh Dougherty, who was staying in the hotel room next door to the would-be assassin who targeted the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday, appeared on MS NOW to discuss the gaping holes in the security surrounding the event.
Dougherty detailed his experience as a guest at the Washington Hilton in an essay earlier in the day.
“A man who wanted to kill people—many people, maybe me, maybe my colleagues—had checked into the Washington Hilton, just like I had. He had used his access to move from floor 10 to the ballroom lobby, just like I had,” Dougherty wrote.
Appearing on MS NOW’s The Weekend: Primetime on Sunday night, Dougherty answered questions about what he witnessed, which included a three-hour delay between the attempted shooting and a bomb squad’s arrival on the scene.
Dougherty described attempting to go upstairs to his room to retrieve a phone charger, only to be confronted by Hilton security and several uniformed officers, who asked if he could return in 20 minutes instead.
When he returned an hour later, Dougherty was still unable to access his room, at which point a detective informed him they were waiting for a judge.
“At that moment, I realized if you’re waiting for a judge, by implication, you’re waiting for a warrant,” Dougherty said, understanding this meant that the suspected shooter, 31-year-old Cole Tomas Allen, had likely been a guest at the hotel.
Dougherty added that after he went back downstairs and went outside to take a phone call, he saw the bomb squad enter the hotel, noting that three hours had passed since gunshots were fired.
“It seems odd that three hours passed from the time that I guess this shooting happened and the bomb squad came in,” MS NOW’s Catherine Rampell said.
“It does seem odd, yes,” Dougherty replied before stressing that “all of us who were there felt immense gratitude for the courage of those officers and agents who tackled the shooter” and that he could “not speak more highly of the hotel staff.”
“I think the question here is more about the planning and the preparation that went on,” he added.
Dougherty noted that the hotel didn’t conduct any searches prior to the event, including during check-in.
“There were never any searches,” he said, adding that there were no magnetometers used except for the checkpoint directly outside the ballroom.
“The only time I went past a checkpoint was at the same magnetometers that Cole Allen, 31, sprinted past with his gun,” Dougherty wrote in his essay.
Senior law enforcement sources who spoke to CBS News said that Allen used the hotel’s interior stairwells to bypass public areas, emerging on the terrace level above the ballroom where a pre-drinks reception had been held.
“I was surprised,” Dougherty said of the security arrangements, noting that his colleagues who had also covered previous WHCA dinners where previous presidents were not in attendance pointed out that the security measures were the same.
He also shared how easy it was for guests to share tickets, describing a colleague who was running late asking him to text her a photo of her ticket, which he had, since a photo would be enough to gain access to the event.
“That allowed her to get as far as the magnetomers,” he said. “So it does seem to me to raise a serious question.”
Officials familiar with the event’s security plans told The Washington Post that the Trump administration provided a lower level of security for the dinner than it has for other gatherings of high-ranking officials. President Donald Trump was joined at the event by many senior members of his administration, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller. FBI Director Kash Patel was also in attendance, though as a guest of the Daily Mail.
Allen was reportedly armed with a shotgun, a handgun, and several knives when he exchanged gunfire with law enforcement outside the ballroom before he was tackled to the ground and apprehended.
Ten minutes prior to the shooting, Allen sent his family members a manifesto in which he apologized for what he was about to do, but said that he felt “rage thinking about everything this administration has done.”
Allen’s own brother reported the manifesto to authorities two hours after the incident.
In his manifesto, Allen allegedly criticized the lax security measures in place, writing, “What the hell is the Secret Service doing?”
“I walk in with multiple weapons and not a single person there considers the possibility that I could be a threat.”
