As loudly as President Donald Trump praised the security at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner on Saturday night, the truth is that it was a fiasco.
Secret Service agents were racing down the center aisle at the dinner after the shots were fired, while Trump and the head table guests were still sitting.
Mentalist Oz Perlman, the entertainment for the evening, was doing an illusion for Melania Trump before being rushed out through a side entrance.
Thankfully, nobody was killed, and the would-be assassin was stopped before he could carry out his deadly mission.
But let’s not forget just how close he got.
The 31-year-old gunman was just feet away from sprinting into a room filled with the president, the vice president, major figures in the Cabinet, and the cream of the country’s media.
And he took guards by surprise as he dashed past them in an attempt to evade the final security check: a metal detector that would have revealed he was carrying a weapon.
It appears that while the man was stopped after firing one bullet at a Secret Service agent, the three or four shots fired at him seem to have missed.
Security checks were peremptory. Five times, guests were asked for their tickets, but at no point were they asked to show identification. Tickets were glanced at rather than examined. Two minutes on AI could create an effective fake. Nowhere on the tickets was the assigned attendee identified.
One guest said they were told a copy of a ticket on their phone would allow them access to the event past the police barricades outside.
“I didn’t have my ticket and I was stopped at the bottom of the hill outside. The police said if I could show them an image of the ticket, I could get in,” they said.
“I got an image of my ticket, but it didn’t have my name on it and I wasn’t asked for any identification. I could have been anybody,” they added.
They said other people had similar experiences.
The Daily Beast has learned that the suspect was believed to be a guest at the Washington Hilton hotel, the venue for the dinner. Guests were able to use some elevators from their rooms that took them past as many as three levels of security.
No room key was required to use the elevator.
The Capitol Police had no clue where members of Congress were sitting in the ballroom after many guests had already left. Officers were sent around the hall after the incident, trying to work out where they had been located.
Any lawmakers still in the ballroom were asked via a loudspeaker to go to the front of the room.
The Capitol Police later put out a statement reading, “The Members of Congress who attended the White House Correspondents’ Dinner are safe and secure.”
The hours before the dinner were chaotic, with guests lining up outside some doors at the back of the building and hundreds of people filling the corridors inside. There did not seem to be any security checks at some entrances.
“It is so easy to see how someone looking reasonably well-dressed could get so far. The security was a joke,`’ said another guest.
