The story traces a near-assassination at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner, a separate shooting near Lafayette Park two weeks earlier that went cold, and reported internal disputes and leadership failures inside the Secret Service that critics say left protections weakened.
The incident at the Washington Hilton forced President Donald Trump to be evacuated and the dinner postponed, leaving a lot of unsettled questions about perimeter security and screening. Reports say the gunman, Cole Allen, nearly breached the venue with an apparent intent to assassinate the president and other officials. People are asking whether standard checks and layers of protection worked the way they were supposed to.
Journalists on the ground painted a worrying picture of the hotel on the night before the dinner. Fox News’ Bill Melugin expressed concerns about how things unfolded, and Daily Beast executive editor Eric Dougherty noted that he and the suspect were both staying at the Washington Hilton. Observers say baggage checks and hotel entrance screening were lacking, with checkpoints only outside the ballroom rather than at hotel entry points.
The president publicly praised the Secret Service for their response that night, calling their actions heroic and saying protocols were fine, while others describe a contrasting scene of confusion. RealClearPolitics’ Susan Crabtree has reported on what she calls chaos and incompetence that some officials say has lingered since the Butler rally incident in July 2024. That reporting adds pressure as critics ask whether internal breakdowns allowed another close call.
First, the shooting around Easter that’s stumped the Secret Service, as reported by RealClearPolitics:
Just after midnight early in the morning after Easter Sunday, Secret Service Uniformed Division officers responded to a shooting near the White House and D.C.’s Lafayette Park, but the Secret Service couldn’t pinpoint exactly where the shot landed. The Secret Service investigated and found rifle shell casings at 16th and I Streets, and a video located the shooter’s vehicle but no images of the gunman.
The Secret Service conducted a search of the park, which was fenced for repairs, and didn’t find a suspect. The agency publicly noted that it had heightened its security posture around the White House in response to the shooting.
The Secret Service publicly said it was looking for a possible vehicle and a person of interest, but that was not the full story, according to two Secret Service sources. The Secret Service had pinpointed the vehicle the shooter used, but it ended up having stolen plates so the agency couldn’t track it to any identifying information about the shooter, and the case went cold.
President Trump continued to want answers, but the Secret Service didn’t fully inform him or others at the White House about all they had uncovered in the probe.
The Secret Service didn’t immediately respond to an inquiry asking why the investigation into the shooting two weeks ago went cold. The agency also didn’t say whether that shooting was related to last night’s shooting at the Washington Hilton, the site of President Reagan’s shooting 45 years ago that wounded Reagan, his press secretary James Brady, Secret Service agent Tim McCarthy, and Metropolitan Police officer Thomas Delahanty.
“They were downplaying the incident,” one source told RCP. “I think they didn’t want to upset [Trump]. He doesn’t know all the details.”
“The stolen plates threw a wrench into the investigation,” the source added. “The park is closed and with all the buildings echoing the noise of the gunshot, it’s hard to pinpoint anything.”
Beyond the two shootings, sources say internal fights over reforms have gummed up efforts to shore up the agency. Reportedly, former Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem pushed for changes that were blocked by White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, and the administration has stood behind current Secret Service director Sean Curran. Those allegations come amid listings of past mishaps and lapses critics point to as evidence of a pattern.
In the wake of another assassination attempt on President Trump at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner Saturday night, sources tell me that White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles rejected efforts by former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem to impose more reforms on the Secret Service earlier this year after a string of scandals and failures.
The DHS leadership team at the time wanted to install a political, hand-selected chief counsel after Secret Service Director Sean Curran’s top attorney resigned after an embarrassing road-rage incident, which RealClearPolitics first reported.
Wiles, who directly oversaw the Secret Service and kept Curran in place despite numerous lapses and scandals, resisted efforts to install a hand-selected chief counsel, a former administration official with direct information about it told RealClearPolitics.
These sources also contend that Wiles undercut another effort to have a DHS deputy chief of staff offer reform recommendations to the Secret Service.
In fact, when the DHS deputy chief of staff visited the Secret Service to offer them, Wiles had the individual walked out of the building after Curran complained to her, the sources assert.
The security lapses and embarrassing incidents include: missing the stand in a tree at West Palm Beach International airport, allowing Code Pink protesters to harass Trump and several cabinet members at a D.C. restaurant, missing a glock during screening at a Trump golf course in Virginia, two officers getting into a physical fight outside President Obama’s residence, an agent celebrating Charlie KIrk’s assassination on social media, and numerous others.
How many close calls does Trump get before Curran and others at the Secret Service lose their jobs? — a former administration official asked in an interview with RealClearPolitics
after the assassination attempt at the White House Correspondents Dinner.
“The guy is going to get killed, and everyone will keep their jobs,” the former official remarked.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt flatly denied the assertions that Wiles opposed the DHS leadership team’s Secret Service reforms.
“Let me be clear: Nobody cares more or has pushed harder, or has asked more hard questions about President Trump’s safety than Susie Wiles,” she said in a statement to RCP. “The insinuation that Susie would object to anything that would help strengthen protection for her boss and friend is absolutely absurd.”
Leavitt did not respond to specific questions about whether Wiles was involved in a decision to walk the DHS deputy chief of staff offering reform recommendations out of Secret Service headquarters or rejected the appointment of a political chief counsel.
A source familiar with presidential security protocols said Wiles has let Curran remain in his job despite numerous failures on his watch and no firings for Butler. In fact, Curran gave two Butler supervisors big promotions even though they failed to ensure that all the buildings at the Butler rally were covered with security assets One is now an assistant director in charge of professional responsibility and all disciplinary actions against Secret Service employees.
“They’re about to fire Kash, and he had nothing to do with this when Susie oversees the Secret Service, and it’s failure after failure after failure, and she gets no blame,” the source said.
“This should’ve been the most secure perimeter in the world. And the fact that the guy made it through the mags underscores the epic failure of the US Secret Service in protecting the president.”
Other sources tell RCP that Wiles never wanted Curran as USSS director, but Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump pulled for him.
If anything goes wrong, “It’s on the boys,” for choosing him, Wiles has remarked to other top administration officials after Trump decided to tap him, according to multiple administration sources.
It was Wiles’ call because she was overseeing the Secret Service after ANOTHER embarrassing incident in which Secret Service Chief of Staff, Tyler McQuiston (another Curran pick) bypassed the WAVES system of entry at the White House and walked his former CitiGroup colleague into a meeting in the West Wing that this individual wasn’t invited to.
Wiles was incensed over the protocol breach by a Secret Service chief of staff — and then took a special interest in overseeing the Secret Service — AND, required the Secret Service to ensure such a White House breach never happened again.
The Secret Service decided to yank the unfettered badge access of more than a dozen top Secret Service officials. This is unprecedented — to be forced to yank Secret Service badge access to the White House from top-level Secret Service officials.
I reported this at the time — but it was on the same week that Charlie Kirk was assassinated, so the news got buried.
Afterward, Curran said he couldn’t explain why the WHCA security perimeter wasn’t expanded and declined to go into details because of classification. “There’s a reason, but I’m not going to get into that. It’s classified. I don’t want to get into why we did that,” he said. Critics say that answer is unsatisfying and that leaders must provide clearer accountability for repeated failures.
The series of incidents and the slow-moving investigation into the Lafayette Park shooting have sparked calls inside and outside the administration for sharper oversight and reforms. The tension over how to fix the agency, who should lead those fixes, and how transparent the Secret Service should be is only growing as more reporting and sources press for the answers the public and the president want.
