← Bulwark Takes
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- [00:58]
Sam Stein
Spotify get terms apply hey everyone, it's me, Sam Stein. It is about 11:10pm on Saturday night, April 25th. I'm coming to you dressed in a tuxedo because I was supposed to be in and around the White House Correspondent association events tonight. I was not actually at the dinner, but as you probably know by now, there was an incident at the correspondence Correspondence association dinner. A shot was fired, at least one shot was fired outside the ballroom. The President is safe and secure. The Vice President is safe and secure. What we know now is that a suspect was taken down. He's in custody, appears to be alive. Everyone else appears safe, alive. President Trump just spoke back at the White House about the incident, but the Correspondence association dinner has been canceled. It may be rescheduled in 30 days or so, according to the President of the United States. It's a chaotic scene. I'm in touch with a bunch of people there, grateful that they're all safe, grateful frankly, that I'm not there. But we wanted to at least try to come live, I suppose, in this moment, because probably you've been seeing a lot of this and you probably have some questions. So I'm going to try to unpack everything that we know and just sort of give my perspective on what the dinner is like and how this may have happened and why it's so appalling as someone who's been to the dinner multiple times. So first and foremost, I think it's important to sort of set the scene about what this dinner is like. This is at the Washington Hilton Hotel. It's kind of in the North Dupont area of Washington, D.C. pretty well trafficked area, but not downtown, necessarily. The dinner's been at this hotel forever. The hotel is sort of famous because this was the same hotel where Ronald Reagan was shot, nearly killed when he was president. The hotel is usually quite secure when you go into the dinner. So I'm going to try to sort of talk through what it's like to actually get into the dinner, which should underscore how wild it is that someone was able to get down to the bowels of the ballroom and apparently fire a shot. This dinner, you have to go through the entrance on a floor, and you have to get into the dinner, into the hotel. You have to show it an invitation to get into the hotel. And then there's a bunch of parties that essentially are happening on the first floor when you enter. And people who are actually staying in the hotel kind of line up in the hotel to see who's coming in and who's going and all that stuff. And so just to get into the hotel, you do have to actually show some sort of identification or an invitation to be at the dinner. Once you're at the hotel and you're in there to get into one of these sort of side parties, which happen to be in, you know, what would be sort of like a meeting room, a gathering room, you'd have to show an invitation or talk to someone and say, hey, I'm on the list. There's a bunch of security personnel there. It is just absolutely full with Secret Service and walking around. You need to, at least on occasion, show identification. So that's just the first floor. To get to the actual White House correspondence dinner, you have to go down, I believe, two escalators, not just one, because there's a second level, a lower level that you can actually enter in on the side from the outdoors. It's on the side. It's on, I believe, T Street. T Street, Connecticut Avenue Hotel, right in the middle. T Street goes up like this. Connecticut comes in like this. You can enter here on Connecticut Avenue onto the first floor. You can enter here on T Street, which is a floor below. So there's two ways in. But either way, you do have to show identification. And the dinner is not here on this level. It's one level down. So you still have to go down an escalator. And usually you have to show your invitation at the top of the escalator to get down to what is essentially the basement level, to get to the big ballroom where this dinner happens. And every time I've been there, you do have to show you have an invitation at the top of that escalator, you go down and that's where the metal detectors are. So there's usually go down the escalator, get into a big line and there's just a line, several lines of metal detectors that you have to go through to get into the dinner in order to find your way into the bottom. And so this person, this alleged shooter had to get into one of those levels, the T street one or the Connecticut Avenue one, and then get down an escalator. And it appears from security fridge we're playing a little bit. We'll play first the, the incident of the shooting. The scared. The person had to get into the escalator and then try to get into the ballroom where the shooting was happening. So just to back up for a second, people are mingling about the Hilton for what's probably like a couple hours for the pre parties. They all get ushered into that basement level, they go into the ballroom, they get seated. We're talking like a couple thousand people in this ballroom, multiple like 100 plus seat tables where they have to be seated. Everyone's got to go in there, they're all crammed in there. It is massive, it's cavernous. And once you're there, you're seated. And you don't go back out, you can go back out, you gotta go right back through the metal detectors anyway. And so what appears to have happened is that everyone had gone in, gotten their seats and from what I understand had been served the salad course. It's a three course meal, salad, then main meal, then dessert. And usually what happens, you eat your salad and then as you're eating your dinner, the speakers start. And at some point, I guess between the salad and the dinner with Donald Trump on the dais and this is the President, it's his first White House correspondents dinner. He's sitting on the dais with a bunch of members of the White House Correspondents association waiting to ostensibly praise the journalists in attendance for the work they've done covering him. They're waiting there. Oz the mentalist, who is the entertainer of the evening, appears to be in his routine. And then suddenly, from what we understand, shots or the sound of shots come out from outside the ballroom. So after they've gone down the escalator into the basement, some shots ring out and Secret Service comes busting in to whisk away the President and all the other dignitaries who are there at the dinner. So why don't we play the footage that we have of what happened which sparked this Chaotic scene tonight. Secret Service rushes in from the stage, from the side of the stage to get him done and get him out. And there's a lot of reporting coming in. One of the people who appears to have been, I guess, close to the alleged shooter is Wolf Blitzer of cnn, who had left the ballroom to go out into the hallway to go to the bathroom, which is out in the hallway. And that's where the shooter apparently had been charging. And, you know, there's some, frankly, wild correspondence from Wolf Blitzer, who was, I guess, fearful for his life, honestly, because the shooter was barging in. This is a little bit wild. I mean, it's really scary, honestly, that in this type of hyper security atmosphere, someone could get that close. Now, this is a. We're dealing with conflicting reports or just, I guess, not conflicting parts. We're dealing with reporting in the moment, which is not always the most illuminating. And there's gonna be different iterations of this. But the sort of best understanding that we have is that this guy, this LED shooter, charged through the metal detectors looking like he was potentially trying to make a run for the ballroom. So he went through the metal detectors into the hallway outside the ballroom where I guess, Wolf Blitzer was and was taken down by Secret Service. You can look at it two ways. One is he. It's. It's a little bit surprising that he even got that far, it would suggest. And again, nothing. Nothing is confirmed. I'm just sort of trying to get the best information that we have that he had a ticket potentially. I'm not sure how he can get to that lower level without one. But, um, but either way, he got down to the lower level and apparently made a run for it through the metal detector and was pretty close, it appears, to the ballroom before he was taken down by the Secret Service, according to what looks like security footage, video that the President posted after all this happened. And again, the President is. He's okay. Thank God, he's safe. He went back to the White House, he gave a press conference, and we're going to play a little clip from that. But the shooter did make it that close. Let's take a look at the security footage that the President posted. All right, so what you can see there is on the far left is the metal detector. All these people there, minus the person who is now running right through the metal detector. You can see this person on the top left of your screen. Everyone else, there is security. Those doors that you see there, I believe. I believe those doors are to the ballroom. Okay, so you get down the escalator, and then you go through those metal detectors, and then you go into the bar. That gives you a sense of how close this person looks to be. Unless I'm mistaken, that's not a bar entrance, but I believe that it's a barometric. So let's press play. Okay. You can see all the Secret Service drawing their guns, apparently firing on this person. That gives you a sense of how close this was to a real catastrophe. Again, to stress, there are thousands of people in there. All the major White House correspondents are there, Guests are there. It is a really packed, packed ballroom. This person was taken down, but apparently is alive. The name that we've been given, according to various reports, so it's not completely confirmed as of this recording, is 30 year old, I believe Cole Allen from California. Allegedly. Apparently a teacher in California. We have no idea what the motivation is as of yet, but I believe he's this person. And again, I'm reluctant to even, like, give too much details because we still have anything confirmed, but I believe this person is like a 25 donor to Kamala Harris. I don't know if that means anything. Okay, we. I'm just reading a tweet here because apparently the mayor of D.C. mayor Bowser, is doing oppressor as well right now, and what she says is a soul gunman rushed a Secret Service checkpoint in a lobby at the hotel. As we just saw, Secret Service agents stopped the suspect, and the interim police chief of D.C. says he was armed with a shotgun, a handgun, and multiple knives. So this person clearly was coming to do harm, real harm. We don't know the motivation. I mean, we can make guesses. We can, you know, infer. Although I'm not sure $25 donation to Harris is enough. But we can infer what we want. But what we know now, the basic facts are this person was armed with a shotgun, a handgun, and multiple knives, according to the interim police chief of Washington, D.C. and they managed to get to the basement. I'm not sure. My thoughts haven't really quite processed what this means, both politically, but more important only from, like, a security and logistical standpoint. There's a lot. A lot of absurd and frankly, kind of reckless stuff on Twitter. If you go and you just do the, you know, algorithm stuff, among other things. You know, everyone is just sort of decamping to their political corners. You know, I've seen people say that this is, you know, because of Iran. I've seen people say this is because, you know, of Trump. I've seen People say this is a false flag. It's all I'm asking is that folks just chill out and wait. Like, just wait.
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Sam Stein
There's no sense in trying to be. There's no sense in trying to be first and trying to like, get your stuff out there and get a lot of likes. It's stupid. According to interim D.C. police chief, the suspect, this guy was believed to have been a hotel guest, which is interesting. This is according to the Associated Press. I'm literally reading Twitter right now as I'm talking to you. Which means that they were able to get into the hotel prior to probably more, I don't know, invasive security check. They still would have to get down to the bowels of the state of the ballroom, which means they, they would have probably needed a, a ticket of some sort. But it looks like this was a hotel guest, which maybe can give you some more insight into potential motivation. The APL says the intended target is unknown as of now. You can suspect it was Donald Trump. Obviously he's been targeted twice now prior to tonight with assassination attempts. I've seen leftists out there saying, well, you know, this is. Trump has been fomenting anger towards journalists. It could have them. You know, again, I would just encourage people to just take a breath and try to understand that this is a very, very difficult and involving situation. The other bit of speculation or conjecture or commentary as well, you know, they should have had this. This is why the White House ballroom should be built. And I'm not totally under. I'm not sure I understand that. There's no sense that the White House Correspondents association would have held the event to the one of the ballroom if there was a ballroom that had already been built. But people wanted to score some points. So I get that they're jumping to conclusions. One officer was shot in this. And I think it's important to express gratitude to the members of the Secret Service who risked their lives yet again and incredibly noble and grateful for the work that they do and just awful that someone was shot. Luckily, apparently, according to reports, the officer was checked out and is okay. So again, just to reiterate, this is an event that could have been a lot more tragic and ultimately appears we avoided some real catastrophe. After it was done briefly, there was talk that they were going to actually have the event go on, that they were just going to take a little break, figure it out and actually go on with the show, which was shocking and kind of remarkable to me. There's a crime scene out there. Someone nearly was killed or at least two people were nearly killed, and what appears to be an assassin, an assassination attempt, nearly happened. And. And they were thinking of plowing forward with it, ultimately decided not to do it. And they announced that they were going to try to reschedule it in 30 days, as I mentioned, which seems much more logical to me because it would have been really crazy to just go on with the event. From what I understand from talking to people who are at the scene, everything was locked down, like, completely locked down, and people were sort of stuck, not sure what to do. There were people who were really hungry because they hadn't served dinner yet. What looked like a text thread with RFK Jr. S son was circulating where he was talking to his son. He's saying, I'm okay, but I'm really hungry. There's other reports out there. Cash Patel was on scene, the FBI director. He was a guest of the Daily Mail, and he was sort of fielding calls and trying to figure out what the hell was happening while on the scene. There were obviously a lot of journalists there who were dispatching their reports from the scene and then had to rush back to the White House to cover Donald Trump's press conference. Why don't we play, actually, Donald Trump, who went back to the White House, he was with Todd Blanche, the interim attorney general, and Cash Patel giving remarks. And he was pressed about this. And to his credit, he didn't jump to too many conclusions. He was just sort of talking about the situation, what he knew, and he was asked a couple times about, does this come with the territory? What's going on? This is the third apparent attempt on your life. How do you feel about that? He addressed that at the press conference. So let's play a little bit of that.
- [19:44]
Reporter
Thank you, President Trump, and thank you for updating us on the suspect earlier. Were you aware of any threats? Is your team aware of any threats beforehand? And do you believe you were the target of this tonight?
- [19:54]
President Donald Trump
I guess. I mean, these people, they're crazy. They're crazy. And, you know, you never know. He was very far away from me. He had to go through a lot. We had resources all over. We had resources sitting at tables, literally in disguise, sitting maybe at your table, who knows? But we had. We had people all over the room. So he had a long way to go. That was really a first line of defense. And they got him and they really, you know, they acted incredibly. No, we have. We've had no. There was no notification. We had no idea. Go ahead.
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Reporter
Do you have any political motivations from
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President Donald Trump
this well, you never know. Now we'll be able to tell you that maybe by tomorrow or the next day. You know, he's in custody and they asking him a lot of questions. I guess they're going over Todd, and they're. They're already at his apartment. He lives in California?
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Sam Stein
Yes, sir.
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President Donald Trump
And they'll be. They're over there, so they'll be able to tell you. Thank you, Kate.
- [20:48]
Sam Stein
I don't have much more to say. Again, I wasn't there. I don't want to. All I can tell you is what my experience has been. Having been there in the past, I'm incredibly grateful for the Secret Service for getting this under control. It could have been really. I guess it's hard to sort of truly describe how bunched people are in that room, but it's tables upon tables upon tables of folks just sitting there. That's like 2,000 folks all in round tables all crunched together. If someone happened to get into the ballroom, it would have been a calamity. It would have been a tragedy. There are real questions about how this person was able to even get down the escalator. Again, according to a briefing from the D.C. police, he was a hotel guest. So we suspect that there was some sort of planning there. The fact that he was in the hotel, it suggests that this was. You know, there's some. There's some planning that went into it, but at the end of the day, what we know is this. An attempted shooting did happen. The shooter was taken down and brought into custody by Secret Service. The president, the vice president, members of the cabinet were ushered out to their safety. No one was killed. A agent was apparently shot, but checked out to be okay. And now we're sort of sifting through some of the details that we know to figure out a few things. One is what happened with the security lapses, and, of course, what was the shooter's motivation? The D.C. police did not say anything about that, and they didn't say who the intended targets were. When we get more information, we'll bring it to you. I felt like it was important to just sort of jump on, rush home and jump on to talk to you about what we do know. And I hope this was helpful. But. Yeah, one more time, just thank you to the Secret Service for handling what is a horrifying situation and doing so in a way that actually protected a ton of people. This could have been a real tragedy. And thank you guys for hopping on and watching this. I hope this was helpful. If we get more information, we'll come back to you. But for now, have a good evening, take care and appreciate you guys watching the Borg.
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