Updates on that shooting, the FBI Director's drinking, and, well, UFOs

Today, three updates on stories that I’ve been covering and watching closely or semi-closely in recent months. 

1) The Shooting:

This week a grand jury formally indicted the White House Correspondents Dinner shooter and brought us a little closer to understanding what happened into the Hilton Washington.

I wrote last week about how the “shooting” was so strange and how there seemed plenty of reason to doubt that the suspect, Cole Tomas Allen, fired at all. With some further evidence — including the release of higher-resolution security camera footage, some evidence from the government’s statements, and mostly work by the New York Times — I’m prepared to be convinced that Cole Tomas Allen fired his shotgun once, but man oh man, this still remains just about the strangest shooting I’ve ever seen.

If you haven’t watched it, it’s worth watching — particularly at the higher resolutions available on YouTube:

The video begins with Allen “casing” — in the government’s words — the hotel in the day/hours before and then at about 3:58, you can see the checkpoint on the night of the dinner. The higher resolution video shows several things not evident in the low-quality version that Trump tweeted in the hours after the incident — including that Allen was evidently brandishing the shotgun as he ran through the checkpoint, and we can see the muzzle flashes from the officer who opened fire in the bottom left corner of the video. There is still no indication on the video of a muzzle flash from Allen’s shotgun nor any reaction from the officer who is the apparent target that he is hit by a blast.

However, the New York Times was able to line up the audio of the dinner inside the ballroom with the events outside and through that audio analysis — as well as some smart analysis of some video “artifacts,” like dust being shaken off the ceiling and a table flap blowing — calculate that it appears there was a concussive blast from Allen’s shotgun as he passes through the magnetometer.

We’ve also received some important (alleged) evidence from recent Justice Department court filings. For one, the government is now saying that a pellet consistent with a shotgun shell was recovered from the Secret Service officer’s ballistic vest, and the government has also released the type of ammunition Cole was evidently using. Secondly, the latest set of formal charges now includes the 18 U.S.C. § 111, “assaulting a federal officer” that I had noted was oddly missing from the initial charges.

As the government has said, “At least one fragment was recovered from the crime scene that was physically consistent with a single buckshot pellet.”

According to the Justice Department, the ammunition that Allen (allegedly) had loaded into his shotgun was “home defense” rounds — e.g., ammo intended to kill people, not ducks or fowl — and each shell contained nine pellets:

It remains puzzling why or how Allen could have fired a shotgun with nine pellets at near point-blank range at a Secret Service officer and (a) have there be no visible reaction by the agent in absorbing said blast, even if he was wearing a tactical bullet-resistant vest; (b) how only a single pellet, out of the nine that we would believe would be in the shotgun shell, hit the officer; and (b) why there’s no additional, obvious, convincing evidence of the shotgun blast inside as confined a space as an indoor hotel terrace. That’s just not how shotguns work.  

The New York Times audio and video analysis is convincing that the shotgun fired — but gosh, that’s got to be as close to an “immaculate shotgun blast” as one could imagine.  

Now, the high-resolution video of Allen barging past and through the Secret Service checkpoint raises it own set of meaningful new questions about the security. The one officer who opened fire does so in the most reckless way, firing basically every shot at the suspect when one of his own fellow officers or agents is downrange of the shot — he amazingly misses the suspect with every shot and only by some miracle also misses everyone around him.

This could have been a mass-shooting event from “blue-on-blue” fire the Secret Service officer alone. Somewhat as strangely, the officer draws and opens fire on Allen as Allen runs close enough that the officer’s own body mass would have been a more effective stop — had the officer either stretched out his leg to trip Allen or simply bodychecked him, Allen would have never made it even further past the perimeter.

One other thing I got wrong in my original analysis, as we’ve learned more: It seems like Allen fell, tripped, or laid down of his own accord and was never tackled by security. All-in-all, this story remains just plain weird — not to me in a conspiratorial way, but in the “the facts don’t line up yet.” And, while it still seems like security “worked” in the technical sense, there are a lot of troubling questions the Secret Service should need to answer — as well as some real puzzling questions that investigators need to answer in building their case again Allen still.

2) Kash Patel’s liquor problem.

It’s also been a weird week in the world of Kash Patel and liquor. Wednesday evening, when a friend first texted me a link to this Atlantic article, I first assumed it was just the story from earlier in the day that Kash Patel’s FBI had launched an investigation into the reporter who had broken news about his problematic drinking. Nope! It was a follow-up article about how Patel has been handing out customized bottles of bourbon as FBI director with his name, the FBI shield, and in some cases, his autograph.

Suffice to say: It’s not great to have the FBI Director feature in TWO separate drinking related stories in one day!

In the hours since that story, MS NOW has had two follow-up stories of its own about how Patel has launched a leak investigation into the original Atlantic story, which reported concerns about his drinking, the latest in a whole mess of scandals and problems under his leadership. As MS NOW wrote yesterday, “FBI Director Kash Patel ordered the polygraphing of more than two dozen former and current members of his security detail, as well as other staff, and has been described as being in panic mode to save his job and find leakers among his team, according to two people briefed on the development.”

According to MS NOW: “Patel walled himself off from some senior bureau leaders this week after multiple media reports raised red flags about his leadership, according to three people familiar with his recent actions. Two of the people told MS NOW that the director ordered the polygraphing this week of former and current security detail members, as well as several information technology staff.”

These are astounding developments — and deeply worrying signs about dysfunction at the Bureau, an agency where it’s especially never great to see leadership terribly distracted by internal scandals.

It’s also hard to square Patel’s simultaneous defense that the Atlantic story is entirely fabricated and defamatory and his anti-leak jihad inside the FBI. As I tweeted yesterday, Patel’s behavior is giving real vibes like: “My “I’m not panicking about which close staffer leaked the stories that are definitely certainly not true at all” t-shirt is raising questions already clearly answered by said t-shirt.”

It’s hard to imagine that Patel can survive much more of this — though he has skated through far more controversies thus far than I imagined, perhaps because he continues to serve the president ably: Just this week we saw an FBI raid target the president pro tem of the Virginia State Senate, who had been a force in leading the commonwealth’s redistricting push. It’s a raid almost certainly politically driven — and not surprisingly, as the president likes to target enemy-wise, she is both Black and a woman.

3) UFOs

Speaking of distractions, as the Iran War continues to go poorly, Donald Trump is waving wildly: Look over here instead! The Pentagon released this morning hundreds of pages of new files on UFO and UAP-related sightings, evidence, and reports. It’s part of his strange on-again off-again obsession with UFOs, which seems to be tied into his interest in the idea of the mythic Deep State.

I can’t say I’ve done an exhaustive research dive in the files, but I clicked through some of them and they mostly appear consistent with the thousands of such files released before — which is to say they underscore that there are lots of anomalous sightings, of varying veracity and detail, and that there’s plenty out there that puzzles even the military itself. 

I’d be shocked if there was a smoking gun anywhere in here, but at the same time, the one consistent cover-up has always been that the US government both knows more, tracks more, and has had more sustained interest in UFOs and UAPs than it has ever been comfortable admitting. I spoke with USA Today this morning about the new developments, and they have a fun live-blog of some of the more strange sightings and reports in the new reports.

GMG