A police dog at the White House Correspondents Dinner appeared to have gotten a sniff of the would-be assassin – but was pulled away seconds before Saturday’s shooting, new security footage shows.
The video released by the Justice Department Thursday shows a handler leading a security dog toward the door to a stairwell that alleged shooter Cole Allen would use to try to access the White House Correspondents Dinner armed with a shotgun, knives and other guns.
The dog lingers at the doorway for about three seconds, then walks away after getting an apparent tug from its handler. It then pauses and goes back inside the doorway. The footage does not include sound.
Immediately after the dog and its handler walk away, Allen is seen sprinting though the doorway and through a nearby metal detector, shotgun in hand. The K-9 handler then puts his hand on his right side near where a weapon might be holstered.
Critics of the security for the event that included President Trump, Vice President JD Vance and other top officials are questioning whether the footage points to yet another safety failure.
“The dog obviously knew something was going on and for whatever reason his handler pulled him away,” said Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch. His group has slammed security lapses like protesters who accosted President Trump during a lunch outing last year. It sued for documents from the 2024 assassination attempt on Trump in Butler, Pa.
Allen “probably had the shotgun at the very moment and the dog was onto him. Did the handler see that there was something there? I don’t think by any stretch can this be seen as anything other than a failure by the Secret Service to secure the area around the president,” Fitton said.
“It looks like the handler pulls the dog back enough for him to open the door and run right past him,” said former Assistant FBI Director Chris Swecker.
He said the dog “was focused on that door” and that at a minimum agents, who were part of a multi-agency force, need to cover doors and stairwells leading to the dinner.
“If he’s brandishing a shotgun, you know – a peek on the other side? A little bit of curiosity might have . . . this is ordinary protection. This is not extraordinary protection. That’s what you need at this stage,” he said.
“What we do know is they didn’t look on the other side of the door, it doesn’t appear, and identify whoever was getting the dog’s attention. And then they gave them enough, plenty of opening, to just run right past him.”
The U.S. Secret Service did not respond to questions about the incident, or whether it was a Secret Service dog or an animal provided by another law enforcement agency.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia, which has charged Allen with attempting to kill President Trump, said it had “nothing additional to provide at this time.”
Other video footage released by the government shows Allen, who had checked into the Washington Hilton on Friday April 24 – the day before the shooting – appearing to case the building.
White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles met with Secret Service Director Sean Curran on Monday, a White House official said. That same day, Curran met with Senate Judiciary Chairman Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) and ranking member Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.), according to a Grassley online post.
Gaps in security may have encouraged Allen to carry out the plot he wrote about in an unhinged manifesto. “What emboldened this guy was he did a walk around, and he checked in, and he said, ‘Wow, I can get through this.’ Security is about deterrence as much as anything else,” said Swecker.
