DISCLAIMER: This article was first published on April 29, 2026
On Saturday night, Cole Tomas Allen, a 31-year-old California engineer, charged a security checkpoint outside the White House Correspondents’ Dinner armed with a shotgun, a handgun and multiple knives. He was stopped before reaching the ballroom.
New court filings released Tuesday reveal what the final 30 minutes before his attack looked like.
According to the Daily Mail, at 8:13 p.m., Allen looked up the president’s schedule on his phone from his tenth-floor room at the Washington Hilton. At 8:27 p.m., he watched live video of Trump entering the ballroom. At 8:30 p.m., he sent his confession to his family by email.
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Somewhere in between, he took a mirror selfie in full evening dress, red tie tucked into his pants, ammunition bag strapped across his chest. Then he went downstairs.
🚨JUST IN: The DOJ released new images of Cole Allen, who attempted to assassinate President Trump. Here is a mirror selfie he took about 30 minutes before charging past the magnetometers. pic.twitter.com/7PAzX68pON
— Raylan Givens (@JewishWarrior13) April 29, 2026
The court filing describes Allen wearing a black dress shirt, black slacks and what appears to be a red necktie tucked into his pants. He was also carrying a small leather bag filled with ammunition, a shoulder holster, a sheathed knife, pliers and wire cutters. The pliers and wire cutters have not been publicly explained.
The Washington Post footage, released Tuesday, is four seconds long and answers several questions while raising others.
A uniformed officer spots Allen almost immediately and moves to intercept. Shots are fired. Allen keeps moving. The shotgun produces no visible muzzle flash during the sprint, a detail prosecutor are still working through in their forensic analysis. He disappears from the frame, makes it up a staircase and loses his footing on the landing one floor above the president.
The exchange lasted seconds.
Investigators currently believe Allen discharged his weapon once or twice while the responding officer fired three to four times. The officer missed every shot. The agent who was struck is still the subject of ongoing ballistic analysis to determine exactly what hit him and from which direction.
Allen’s route to that staircase was not accidental. He avoided the hotel’s primary security corridors entirely, using a back stairwell that deposited him directly into the area connecting to the dinner entrance.
His manifesto had noted his surprise at the apparent lack of security. “What the hell is the Secret Service doing?” he wrote. “No damn security. Not in transport. Not in the hotel. Not in the event.” The new footage suggests his assessment of the checkpoint was at least partially accurate.
The Secret Service responded to the footage by stating its security measures are “rigorously tested” and “were critical in mitigating the threat and preventing significant harm.”
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche was asked whether Allen fired the shot that struck the agent. “We want to get that right. So we’re still looking at that,” he said. He nonetheless praised the response: “Law enforcement did not fail. They did exactly what they are trained to do.”
Featured image via X screengrab
