Is the Justice Department lying about Saturday's "shooting"?

As regular readers know, this isn’t usually anything close to a daily newsletter, but there’s a lot to say about Saturday’s “security incident.”

Conspiracies have flown fast and wide since Saturday night’s incident at the White House Correspondents Dinner — there are a lot of online rumors and theories that this was a “false flag” operation. As I wrote Monday, I don’t believe that for a whole variety of reasons, but the more we learn, it does appear that something important isn’t adding up in the government’s story about Saturday.

If you read my quick analysis Sunday morning, you might have seen that I had immediate questions about the number of gunshots — six — we heard on the ballroom audio. It was way more gunshots than had been explained at that point.

Now we might have some answers: A close reading of the Justice Department’s charges Monday afternoon against 31-year-old Cole Allen hint that he didn’t fire any weapon at all.

In fact, it’s not clear from what we know that this was a “shooting” at all.

* * *

Let’s back up a bit first and start with a quick note on terminology: Under normal circumstances, the magnetometers at a presidential event are manned by officers of what’s known as the Secret Service Uniformed Division. 

These are not “agents” in common parlance — if you’re a regular reader of this newsletter, these are so-called “1801s,” the government’s street cops. Their primary job is guarding fixed posts at places like the White House and Naval Observatory, patrolling embassies, and acting more as the “police” to support and supplement the Secret Service special agents, the so-called “1811s,” the government’s detectives, who provide the close-in protective details and, more broadly, investigate threats against protectees and financial crimes from counterfeiting to cybercrime. (I wrote a big explainer of 1801s vs. 1811s here.)

At Saturday’s event, attendees have reported that TSA officers were helping run the magnetometers, which is a fairly common supplement, but also probably an indication of how much the Secret Service is overstretched. It’s a very small agency for what it does, with about 3,500 special agents and about 1,500 officers in the uniformed division. (It’s a topic for another column someday, but I think we’re going to learn that a big part of the “laxness” of Saturday’s security is simply how overstretched and overworked the Secret Service is, even before you get into that we’re months into a partial shutdown of DHS. The Secret Service today has around 40 full-time protectees, details that can range from a handful of agents up to the hundreds that protect the sitting president and vice-president. The number of protectees has roughly doubled since the Obama years, while the Secret Service has only added about 300 total agents to its corps. It is desperate for its own hiring surge.)

As of now, we believe the sole person injured by gunfire Saturday night was a uniformed Secret Service officer, who according to an FBI affidavit backing up the criminal charges Monday, also drew his service weapon and returned fire.

In a press conference Monday afternoon, acting attorney general Todd Blanche reported that the Justice Department was charging Cole Allen with three crimes: (1) attempt to assassinate the President of the United States, (2) transportation of a firearm & ammunition in interstate commerce with intent to commit a felony, and (3) discharge of a firearm during a crime of violence:

According to the Justice Department documents, Allen was carrying two firearms at the time: A 12-gauge pump action shotgun and a Rock Island Armory 1911 .38 caliber pistol. There’s no indication he fired or drew the pistol, but the Justice Department is basing that third criminal charge on its theory he fired the shotgun.

But they don’t appear to have meaningful evidence to back that up — and there’s a lot of public circumstantial evidence to the contrary.

As the New York Times wrote, “Mr. Blanche said investigators believed the suspect fired his weapon because a spent shotgun shell was found inside its chamber, but he noted that more forensic examination would be done to determine exactly what happened.”

Really? After more than 24 hours, the forensic teams of the FBI and Secret Service can’t figure out whether the suspect fired off a shotgun inside the Washington Hilton?

That’s very hard to believe. 

We don’t know exactly what kind of ammunition the shotgun was loaded with, but unless he was using some strange custom shell, there would normally be two standard types of shells — a “slug,” a large solid shot primarily used for hunting big game, or buckshot, a shell loaded with somewhere between eight and twenty smaller rounds.

Buckshot would be most common and expected.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the differences between say a handgun, a rifle, and a shotgun, here’s a quote from a “tactical” shooting website reviewing the power of a 12-gauge shotgun like the one Cole Allen was allegedly carrying Saturday: “The 12 gauge shotgun is widely regarded by many to be the top performer with regards to terminal effectiveness in the armed citizen’s arsenal. The go-to anti-personnel load is buckshot, which consists of a shot shell loaded multiple smaller projectiles known as shot. The most common buckshot size used for defensive or tactical applications is 00 (pronounced ‘double-aught’). 00 shot shells generally contain eight or nine .330 caliber projectiles. To put that in context, one pull of the trigger is essentially the same as shooting eight or nine 9mm ball rounds all simultaneously. Buckshot produces some serious wound channels, and there is a reason why many folks regard the ‘stopping power’ of the shotgun as second to none.”

So far, audio analysis by the Wall Street Journal and others seem to indicate there were six shots and Blanche now says the Secret Service officer fired five of those. According to Blanche, the Secret Service officer who was shot was hit in the vest by a single shot — authorities had previously used the word “bullet” to describe what shot him, which is what one would call something fired by a handgun or rifle, not a shotgun.

If Allen fired off a shotgun inside an enclosed space like the single-story terrace lobby of the Washington Hilton, one would expect plenty of evidence of that happening. Buckshot would have peppered a fairly significant area.

In one of the weird comments Blanche made, he said, “When you fire a bullet, the bullet ends up somewhere. Sometimes you find it, sometimes you don’t.” Huh? That might be true if you’re looking for a bullet fired outdoors, but inside a fully enclosed hotel lobby?

Similarly, if the officer was hit by a shotgun burst and taken, say, eight .33-caliber rounds in his vest as opposed to a single bullet, the officer would clearly know the difference and there would be clear evidence on his vest of that impact pattern. And if the suspect had fired a solid shotgun slug, the officer and authorities would clearly — and immediately — know the difference from a typical bullet. Solid slugs come with enormous stopping power and would be what you’d expect to use to try to take down a feral hog or a black bear; if it hit a human at close range, one would expect some serious blunt force injuries, perhaps even fatal blunt force trauma, even if the officer was hit in a bullet-resistant (they’re never really bullet-“proof”!) vest. 

Then there’s the suspicious wording of the charging documents that were released yesterday, which seem to dance carefully around the question of whether the suspect opened fire. It uses a strange passive voice to indicate the gunfire:

“At approximately 8:40 p.m., ALLEN approached a security checkpoint on the
Terrace Level of the hotel leading to the location of the dinner. ALLEN approached and ran through the magnetometer holding a long gun. As he did so, U.S. Secret Service personnel assigned to the checkpoint heard a loud gunshot. U.S. Secret Service Officer V.G. was shot once in the chest; Officer V.G. was wearing a ballistic vest at the time. Officer V.G. drew his service weapon and fired multiple times at ALLEN, who fell to the ground and suffered minor injuries but was not shot. ALLEN was subsequently arrested.”

“Personnel assigned to the checkpoint heard a loud gunshot”? Who fired it? Unclear from the charging documents.

That language to me strongly suggests that the Secret Service officer was hit by friendly fire from another officer or agent — presumably the single other unaccounted for shot. 

There are two more circumstantial things that lead me to doubt that Allen fired any weapons Saturday night.

First, we have the lobby surveillance video posted by the president himself; in the video, Allen runs past the Secret Service magnetometer checkpoint at full sprint. The gunshot by Allen doesn’t take place on the video, nor does he appear to have the shotgun at the ready to fire, which means that if he did fire he would have had — in the presumably mere seconds that follow offscreen before he’s stopped and tackled — to both ready and bring the shotgun to bear and then fire, presumably at close range, at the officer as he approaches, which would have been challenging to do for someone even far more experienced with firearms than Allen appears to be.

Second, there’s also something suspicious in the “dog that didn’t bark” department. While it’s always possible that the Justice Department is moving ahead with a formal indictment that will add more and different charges, in this initial batch of three criminal charges there’s no “assaulting a federal officer” charge like one would expect to see in a case where, you know, someone fired a shotgun into the chest of a Secret Service officer.

It’s not like this administration is shy about what are known as 18 U.S.C. § 111 charges: That’s been the table-stakes charge that every overhyped ICE agent has spent the last six months shouting at anyone who dares to stand in their way — it’s even what Jeanine Pirro, who is prosecuting Allen, used to charge a guy who threw a sandwich at a federal agent. And yet here they’re NOT using it?

Put all of that together and here is what to me is a more likely scenario than what the government is telling us so far:

• An agent or officer close to the checkpoint that Allen blows past — perhaps even the one onscreen in the video who turns and draws his weapon at the fast receding Allen — fires once, hits the other officer in the vest, who then “returns” fire at Allen, firing five shots and missing them all.

This scenario also squares more closely with the audio we have of the shooting, which appears to my unofficial ear to have one shot by one gun, followed by five shots in quick succession from a second gun. (And for what it’s worth, none of them sound to me like a shotgun. I’ve heard shotguns fired inside — they’re loud!)

I want to be clear that none of this is informed by any special inside knowledge or leaks from the investigation. However, I would speculate that the FBI and Secret Service have quickly figured out that (a) the suspect never fired at all, (b) that all of the rounds were fired by Secret Service, and (c) that all six of the government’s shots actually missed the running suspect and (d) instead one actually hit the officer who primarily engaged Cole as he ran. 

I would guess, too, that Todd Blanche and Kash Patel, both desperate to keep their jobs and please Trump, aren’t ready to say all of that publicly, because it would make the event seem less scary or threatening than it was in reality — and hence the weird dancing around and obfuscations of Monday’s press conference.

If so, that means that the government charged the suspect with a crime — “discharge of a firearm during a crime of violence” — they don’t have meaningful evidence (yet) to back up and perhaps even have direct evidence to refute, which would be an astounding violation of Justice Department standards and norms. 

I might be entirely wrong about this, but the total number of shots, lack of other injuries, and strange comments make the story the government is telling — or not telling, as it were — incredibly hard to trust. We will clearly learn more in the days and weeks ahead, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see these charges revised and the third “discharge” charge dropped.

GMG