Transcript
Bill O'Reilly (0:01)
Welcome to the no Spin News Weekend Edition.
Bill O'Reilly (0:07)
Well, what did I do this weekend? If you travel to billoriley.com, you know, and that is the place where any breaking news is. So if you want to waste your time, and we'll prove it to you tonight, if you want to waste your time watching cable news and the others, it's up to you, okay? But you're not going to get the story. I was right in the middle of this thing on Saturday night, and that is the subject of this evening's Talking Points Memo. So let me set the stage for you. 2000 people in the ballroom at the Washington Hilton. That's where Ronald Reagan almost lost his life. I wrote a book, killing Reagan. Some of you might have read it. It's about my fifth correspondence dinner. The first one I took Donald Trump. And that's where all of this stuff between Obama and Trump, where it happened, okay? And so over the years, I know the drill, and I was never uneasy in that ballroom. And this year, I would not have gone. But my son said, please take me, because he's a political science major, obviously wants to see what's going on. So we went and sat at the News Nation table, and for some reason, I was in the back of the ballroom. I think I was coming back from the men's room, and all of a sudden I hear four shots, loud. So I'm in the back of the ballroom. There's a door that was open, and then there's an escalator that takes you up to the main floor of the hotel. So the ballrooms packed, as I said, 2000 in there. So I'm. I'm standing right here. Boom, boom, boom.
Jimmy Kimmel (2:18)
4.
Bill O'Reilly (2:19)
Everybody hits the ground except me and President Trump. We're the only guys. Now, my son is under the table. I just leaned under. I go, how is it under there? He goes, you're going to get shot in the head, dad. And I said, look, if they haven't got me after 50 years, they're not going to get me. And then my son, at the line of the evening goes, I didn't know you were taking me to basic training. Because everybody knew that this was an assassination attempt. Because the Secret Service, I would say 20, 30 seconds after the shots, stormed through the door where I was, ran down the aisle and covered the president. So everybody knew that there were bad things afoot. As Sherlock Holmes once said. Now, as a normal human being, I should have hit the turf, but I had to see what was going on. It was my job. I have to see. So I'm there and I'm watching everything that's unfolding. And luckily for me, a marshal, U.S. marshal, was at the door with a earpiece on. And he was a fan of mine, which always helps. So right after the Secret Service went in, I said to him, you know, what's going on? And he briefed me. He said, is it fracas upstairs? There were shots fired. What we know now, which I didn't know then, was that the shooter fired twice from a pistol, and Secret Service fired two or three shots. Very unusual, because if you shoot at a federal officer, which this guy did in the lobby of the hotel, you're usually dead within five seconds. So it was unusual. So I assume that because there was so many people that the Secret Service is taking, you know, measure. So they. They brought him to the ground quickly. You saw the picture of him laying on the ground. And then they had to decide what was going to happen next. President Trump didn't really want to leave because he doesn't like to show weakness of any kind, doesn't want to be intimidated. This is the third assassination on the man attempt. But they had to leave. And I understood, everybody really understood that. There was so much chaos swirling around now. After that, I then swung into my job, which is to get information. And we quickly established that this guy had taken a train from Chicago to D.C. checked into the hotel. He had a hotel room. There are 3,000, okay, people who can be lodged in the Washington Hilton. 3,000. And then you had 2,000 visitors. That's 5,000 people. Far too many. Far too many people. But you wouldn't know it coming in because there were stations everywhere. Here's the key point. The shooter could never have gotten even close to the President because he had to come down an escalator which was manned, then go through a door where I was and the marshals, and then run down a long corridor, if you want to make it that way. But picture it in your mind, long space before he could get into any kind of shooting range. So that was never a problem, was a problem with that. People were close to the shooter. They were diving all over the place, as you said normal people would do. The people close to the President, the deist. They didn't hear the shots. I tell you, they were loud. I mean, I knew right away, because I've heard gunfire in my life, and. And my son is an avid gun enthusiast. I mean, he hunts all the time. He knew what it was. We knew, and they were loud, as I said. But the people in the other half of the room had no idea what was taking place. When they saw all the federal protection run down, then they knew something was wrong. Okay? Now, this guy, Cole Allen, 31 years old, as I wrote on billoriley.com, it's just unbelievable. This guy will never, ever see freedom again, ever. In addition to destroying his own life. And he had no shot at this. Pardon upon none. Okay, okay. He destroys the life of his family. His family's got to deal with this their whole lives. So this guy's a loon. And then he writes up this crazy thing, a manifesto of why he's doing it, and it just makes no sense at all. The guy in the bushes in Palm beach was a loon. The guy on the rooftop who got killed in Butler, Pennsylvania, was a loon. They're all in the same category. They just don't have control over themselves. That's it. And throughout our history, these have been the profile of all the assassins, the presidential assassins. All of them, from John Wilkes Booth onward. They're just crazy, insane people. And that's what he is. But he'll never, ever get out. So he's been charged with trying to assassinate the president and other charges, but that's the big one. And Jeanine Pirro, who we have on our long form, she is part of the prosecution, but the Attorney General, Todd Bland's taken this over. Okay, then we have reaction. This is another fascinating story. So I'm there, and I'm giving information to News Nation through Kelly Myers, who is a very, very good correspondent. She's the top News Nation Washington correspondent, and I'm giving her what I have because I don't want to hotshot it. Okay? Let her. That's her beat. Let her do it. At the same time, CNN is misreporting what happened. Roll the tape.
