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Sam Stein (0:57)

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.