A Secret Service member shot in the chest at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner may have been mistakenly hit by a fellow agent.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche declined to rule out the possibility in a news conference when asked who fired the shot that struck an officer’s bulletproof vest and left him briefly hospitalized.
After taking a beat, Blanche answered, “We want to get that right, so we’re still looking at that.”
Blanche said a preliminary investigation found that would-be presidential assassin Cole Tomas Allen was not struck by gunfire. He said the injured Secret Service agent was able to detain the 31-year-old suspect after he tripped.
Blanche said the injured agent, who has not been identified, fired five times at Allen, but that each shot missed.
While Blanche was willing to share details about the missed shots, he said he was not going to get into the “exact ballistics” because they are “still being looked at and finalized.”
“One Secret Service officer was shot in the chest, but was wearing a ballistic vest that worked,” Blanche said earlier in the news conference.
The Secret Service did not respond to an email from the Daily Beast seeking clarity on whose bullet injured an agent.
Shots first rang out outside the ballroom of the Washington Hilton around 8:34 p.m. Prior to Blanche’s noncommittal answer on who fired the bullet that injured a Secret Service agent, multiple reports claimed Allen was to blame.
Allen was reportedly armed with a shotgun, a handgun, and a pair of knives that he carried down from his room on the hotel’s 10th floor.
A manifesto reportedly indicated he only wanted to harm Secret Service agents “if necessary” and not other law enforcement and security “unless they shoot at me.”
Despite the attack being ultimately thwarted, the Secret Service has been criticized for allowing an armed man to get so close to the president with weapons in tow. While officials say Allen was quickly detained, Saturday night marks the third known time that a gunman has managed to get in close proximity to Trump in hopes of shooting him dead.
However, Blanche does not see the event as a security failure.
“Law enforcement did not fail,” he said. “They did exactly what they are trained to do.”
Blanche, who is rumored to be auditioning for the full-time AG job, insists that the shooting is the latest proof that Trump’s ballroom project, which has already seen him demolish the historic White House East Wing, needs to resume construction as soon as possible, despite legal efforts to stop it.
Trump likely would be pleased with his push for the ballroom.
“We absolutely believe that there is no better example of why this ballroom is necessary—aside from all the very positive things the ballroom will bring to this country and to Washington, D.C.—than what happened on Saturday night,” he said.
“You guys, many of you all were there,” Blanche continued, addressing the room of Washington reporters. “That’s one of the only places in D.C. that you can hold an event like that, due to its size and the structure of what we need. So we’re basically stuck at this point in this city with having an event like that at a hotel, so underneath a ton of hotel rooms. And so the fact that we—again, aside from the fact that the ballroom is spectacular, it’s going to be beautiful, it’s going to make this country look great every time it’s used—it’s also a meaningful safety issue.”
