Washington shooting suspect charged with attempting to assassinate Donald Trump, but questions linger

The 31-year-old man arrested this weekend for allegedly trying to storm the White House Correspondents’ Dinner has been charged with attempting to assassinate President Donald Trump.

Federal officials said Cole Tomas Allen, of Torrance, California, travelled across the country last week ahead of the black-tie event at the Washington Hilton, then charged a security checkpoint leading towards the gala with a shotgun and pistol.

In an affidavit, an FBI special agent wrote that Allen had an email set to go out to family members and a former employer, which described administration officials as “targets, prioritised from highest-ranking to lowest.”

Allen made a brief court appearance on Monday when a judge announced the charges, which also include transporting firearms across state lines and discharging one of them during a violent crime. If convicted, he faces a minimum sentence of 10 years in prison and potentially life in prison.

More charges are likely to follow, said Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney in D.C.

“Make no mistake, this was an attempted assassination of the President of the United States, with the defendant making clear what his intent was,” Ms Pirro said.

“And that intent was to bring down as many of the high-ranking Cabinet officials as he could.”

Court papers filed Monday shed new light on some of what investigators believe occurred in the days and minutes leading up to the alleged attack.

But the filings - and remarks from top Justice Department officials Monday - left other lingering questions unanswered.

For instance, prosecutors did not say whether Allen shot the round that hit a Secret Service officer in the chest, a shot that was stopped by a bulletproof vest.

Ms Pirro previously said Allen would be charged with assaulting a federal officer, but that count was not among those lodged against him in court Monday.

“We do believe that, as the complaint lays out, that the defendant fired out of his shotgun,” acting attorney general Todd Blanche said at a Justice Department news conference following Allen’s court appearance.

“We know that happened.”

Mr Blanche said that a casing was still inside the shotgun and had not been ejected.

Explaining his hesitancy to definitively say where the round that struck the Secret Service officer came from, Mr Blanche added, “We want to get that right. We’re still looking at that.”

Mr Blanche’s caution on Monday was a shift from his remarks a day earlier, when he said on ABC that officials preliminarily believed the suspected gunman had shot the officer.

At the Monday news conference, the acting attorney-general also said that the officer who was hit fired five shots during the incident, none of which hit Allen.

“All the evidence is being examined very carefully and expeditiously and we’ll know more soon,” Mr Blanche said.

The officer was not identified in court records.

According to the affidavit, on April 6, Allen booked a room at the Hilton for the weekend of the correspondents’ dinner.

He left the Los Angeles area on April 21, took one train to Chicago and then another to DC, arriving little more than 24 hours before the event, the FBI agent wrote.

Allen ran through a magnetometer in a security-screening area steps away from the hotel ballroom - where Trump, top Cabinet officials and journalists were gathered - while holding a long gun, the agent wrote.

As he did so, “US Secret Service personnel assigned to the checkpoint heard a loud gunshot,” according to the FBI affidavit.

A prosecutor, Jocelyn Ballantine, said in court that Allen had “attempted to assassinate the President with a 12-gauge pump-action shotgun,” and was also armed with a .38-calibre, semi-automatic pistol and three knives.

Allen bought both firearms from dealers in California, purchasing the pistol in October 2023 and the shotgun in August 2025, the affidavit said.

Minutes before the incident, prosecutors said, Allen sent an email to relatives and a former employer in which he described his plans to shoot government officials.

Though the message did not mention Trump by name, it is filled with complaints about the president and his policies.

“Administration officials (not including Mr. Patel): they are targets, prioritised from highest-ranking to lowest,” the email reads in part, according to the affidavit, making an apparent reference to FBI Director Kash Patel.

“Secret Service: they are targets only if necessary, and to be incapacitated non-lethally if possible.”

The writer added their “sincerest apologies for all the trouble (they’ve) caused”.

During his court appearance on Monday, Allen, dressed in blue prisoner fatigues, gave only brief responses as a judge read out his rights and prosecutors requested he remain in custody.

He did not enter a plea to the charges, and his next court hearing was set for Thursday.

A public defender assigned to his case, Tezira Abe, said, “Mr. Allen has no prior arrests or convictions, and under the Bail Reform Act, he is presumed innocent at this time”.

The court appearance came as authorities have continued grappling with the incident at Saturday’s dinner and scrutinising Allen and his background.

The incident has sent tremors across Washington and beyond, leaving many attendees at the dinner - who hunkered under tables at the sound of gunfire before being evacuated - shaken.

The episode also raised questions about the security protocols surrounding the event, particularly given that Trump and many Cabinet members were in attendance.

Mr Blanche, however, defended the security response as a success during Monday’s news conference.

Allen was stopped, he said, one floor above the ballroom, with hundreds of federal agents between him and where Trump was seated onstage.

“Law enforcement did not fail,” Mr Blanche said.

“They did exactly what they are trained to do.”

Still, the administration announced plans Monday to review security plans for future presidential events and said White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles would convene a meeting later this week to go over “additional options” to ensure Trump’s safety.

The President “continues to have trust in the United States Secret Service,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters on Monday afternoon.

“These are great men and women who are doing their jobs and performing their ... duties honourably.”