Salem News Channel

President Donald Trump said on Sunday that the suspect accused of trying to attack administration officials at Saturday night's White House Correspondents' Association dinner had an anti-Christian manifesto and "a lot of hatred in his heart" but was stopped well short of the hotel ballroom hosting the event. Trump told Fox News that the suspect was "a sick guy" and that his family previously expressed concerns about him to law enforcement officials. The suspect, whom an official identified as Cole Tomas Allen of Torrance, California, was arrested at the scene of the event in Washington, D.C. "When you read his manifesto, he hates Christians," Trump said on Fox News' "Sunday Briefing" program. The manifesto was sent to Allen's family members shortly before the attack, a law enforcement official told Reuters. The suspect called himself the "Friendly Federal Assassin," the official said. "Turning the other cheek when *someone else* is oppressed is not Christian behavior; it is complicity in the oppressor’s crimes," the manifesto read, according to the official. Targets listed in the manifesto included administration officials - although not FBI Director Kash Patel - prioritized from highest-ranking to lowest, the official said. The manifesto mocked the “insane” lack of security at the Washington Hilton, where the dinner was held, the official added. "Like, the one thing that I immediately noticed walking into the hotel is the sense of arrogance," the manifesto's author reportedly wrote. "I walk in with multiple weapons and not a single person there considers the possibility that I could be a threat.” The suspect traveled by train from Los Angeles to Chicago and then to Washington, acting U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche told NBC's "Meet the Press" program, adding that Trump and top members of his administration were the likely targets. POLITICAL VIOLENCE Officials have said that the suspect fired a shotgun at a Secret Service agent at a security checkpoint in the Washington Hilton hotel before being tackled and arrested. Trump, first lady Melania Trump, Vice President JD Vance and other cabinet officials were rushed out of the dinner as the incident unfolded. The Secret Service agent who was shot escaped serious injury because the bullet struck his protective vest, Trump said. Trump, who had boycotted the media gala in the past, has requested that the dinner be rescheduled within 30 days, adding: "That was going to be an important event." The suspect will be charged in federal court on Monday with assault of a federal officer, discharging a firearm and attempting to kill a federal officer, Blanche said, adding he did not know if there was an Iran connection to the attack. Further federal indictments will be coming later, Blanche said. Saturday's incident came amid a rising tide of political violence in the United States in recent years. Conservative political activist Charlie Kirk was shot dead at a rally last September, just months after the June 2025 slaying of Democratic Minnesota state Representative Melissa Hortman and her husband and the wounding of a Minnesota state senator in June 2025. A Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted in the days following Kirk's murder found that Americans believe that increasingly harsh rhetoric surrounding politics is encouraging violence in the U.S. Around the world, leaders condemned the attack and expressed relief that Trump and all present were safe. NATO leader Mark Rutte called it an attack "on our free and open societies" and leaders stressed violence had no place in a democracy. A planned U.S. visit by King Charles of Britain scheduled to start on Monday will proceed, Trump and British officials said. The British embassy said in a statement that discussions were taking place on whether the incident may affect planning for the visit. SUSPECT PLANNED TO 'DO SOMETHING' Little was immediately known about the 31-year-old alleged shooter's background, but social media postings suggested he was a teacher in Torrance, near Los Angeles. Washington Interim Police Chief Jeffery Carroll said the suspect was armed with a shotgun, a handgun and multiple knives. A White House official said that law enforcement officials who interviewed Allen's sister were told he had a tendency to make radical statements, had attended an anti-Trump "No Kings" protest and referred to a plan to do "something" to fix issues with today's world. Allen had purchased two handguns and a shotgun and stored them at his parents' home, the White House official said. The chaotic events from around 8:35 p.m. raised fresh questions about the security of top U.S. officials, many of whom were gathered in the hotel's expansive ballroom. The dinner was attended by many members of Trump’s cabinet and other senior administration officials amid heavy security. It was the first time Trump attended the event as president, having boycotted it in previous years. Security personnel in combat fatigues stormed the stage pointing rifles into the ballroom as Trump, his wife Melania, and Vice President JD Vance were evacuated. Cabinet members who had been sitting at tables dotted around the vast room were escorted out by their security details one by one. The site of the dinner was the scene of an attempt on the life of President Ronald Reagan, who was shot and wounded by a would-be assassin outside the hotel in 1981. Trump stayed backstage for about an hour after being hustled from the stage, a source told Reuters. He later said he had not wanted to leave the event, a remark that echoed images of him defiantly pumping his fist after narrowly escaping an assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, in 2024.

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President Donald Trump was unharmed and other top White House officials were evacuated from an annual dinner of the White House Correspondents' Association after a man armed with guns and knives stormed the lobby and opened fire. The shooting suspect was taken into custody and identified as Cole Tomas Allen, 31, of Torrance, California, two law enforcement officials told The Associated Press. A motive was not immediately known, and acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said charges related to Saturday night’s attack will be filed shortly.

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President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump were rushed out of the White House Correspondents' Association dinner by Secret Service agents on Saturday night after a man opened fire with a shotgun on security personnel, officials said. The armed man fired at a Secret Service agent, an FBI official told Reuters. About two hours after the incident, Trump told reporters at the White House that the officer was saved by his bulletproof vest and is in "good shape". The suspect, whom Trump described as a "sick person," has been arrested. All federal officials at the dinner, including Trump, were safe. "A man charged a security checkpoint armed with multiple weapons, and he was taken down by some very brave members of the Secret Service," Trump said at a White House press conference after the incident. Closed-circuit TV footage released by Trump on Truth Social showed someone running rapidly through a security checkpoint, momentarily catching security personnel off-guard before they quickly drew their weapons. "You know, he charged from 50 yards away, so he was very far away from the room. He was moving. He was really moving," Trump said after the gala dinner was canceled. Officials believe he is a "lone wolf" who acted alone, Trump said, adding, "He was a guy who looked pretty evil when he was down." Trump said federal agents were raiding the California home of the suspected shooter. Anthony Guglielmi, a Secret Service spokesman, said the service was investigating a shooting near the main screening area at the entrance to the event. After the sound of shots, dinner attendees immediately stopped talking and people started screaming “Get down, get down!" Many of the 2,600 attendees took cover while waiters fled to the front of the dining hall. Security agents pushed cabinet officials to the ground, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum. Other security personnel in combat fatigues stormed the stage and evacuated Trump and his wife. Some security personnel took up position on the stage, pointing their rifles into the ballroom. Cabinet members were evacuated from the venue one by one. The White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, a marquee fixture of Washington’s social calendar each year, was also attended by many members of Trump’s cabinet and other senior administration officials. The event is held in the basement ballroom of the Hilton hotel. Trump and the first lady bent down behind the dais before being hustled out by Secret Service officers. Trump stayed backstage about one hour, a source told Reuters. "We are staying," he was overheard saying, the source said. Trump posted on social media that he hoped the dinner, the first he has attended as president, could be rescheduled in 30 days. He was the subject of two assassination attempts in 2024 while he was campaigning for reelection after leaving the White House in 2021. The most serious attempt occurred while Trump was campaigning at an outdoor rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, in July 2024. Trump was shot and wounded in his upper ear by a 20-year-old gunman. The gunman was shot dead by security personnel. Just over two months after the Butler shooting, Secret Service agents spotted a man wielding a gun and hiding in bushes at the Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Florida, while Trump was on the course. It was deemed an assassination attempt and the suspect was sentenced to life in prison in February. The site of Saturday's dinner, the Washington Hilton, was the scene of an attempt on the life of President Ronald Reagan, who was shot and wounded by a would-be assassin outside the hotel in 1981.

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Officials say a volunteer firefighter has died battling a wildfire in Florida, while two large fires in Georgia have destroyed more than 120 homes. The sheriff's office in Nassau County, Florida, said Friday that volunteer firefighter James “Kevin” Crews died Thursday after suffering an unspecified medical emergency while suppressing a brush fire. Meanwhile, crews are battling two large fires in southeast Georgia that Gov. Brian Kemp says have destroyed 120 homes and threaten nearly 1,000 more. Kemp said no other wildfire in Georgia's history have burned so many homes. He said investigators believe the fire in rural Brantley County was sparked by an aluminum party balloon touching power lines.

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Law enforcement authorities in Florida say they have found the body of one of the two missing University of South Florida doctoral students on a bridge over Tampa Bay, and a roommate has been taken into custody. Hillsborough County Sheriff Chad Chronister said Zamil Limon’s remains were found on the Howard Franklin bridge Friday morning, but Nahida Bristy is still missing. He said Limon’s roommate faces several charges including domestic violence and unlawfully moving a body. The couple from Bangladesh disappeared from campus on April 16.

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President Donald Trump's administration plans to add firing squads, electrocution and gas asphyxiation as alternative methods of executing people convicted of the gravest federal crimes, it announced on Friday, noting difficulties in obtaining drugs for lethal injections. The recommendation came in a Justice Department report fulfilling Trump's promise to resume capital punishment at the federal level in his second term. In his first term, which ended in 2021, he resumed it after a 20-year gap, executing 13 federal prisoners with lethal injections in his final few months in office. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, who released the report, has authorized seeking death sentences against nine people after Trump rescinded a moratorium on federal executions by his predecessor, Joe Biden, the department said. "Among the actions taken are readopting the lethal injection protocol utilized during the first Trump Administration, expanding the protocol to include additional manners of execution such as the firing squad, and streamlining internal processes to expedite death penalty cases," it said in a statement. In the report, Blanche instructed the Justice Department's Bureau of Prisons to modify its execution protocol "to include additional, constitutional manners of execution that are currently provided for by the law of certain states," pointing to the older methods of firing squads and electrocution, and the new gas asphyxiation method pioneered by Alabama in 2024. "This modification will help ensure the Department is prepared to carry out lawful executions even if a specific drug is unavailable," the report said. Biden, a Democrat, commuted the sentences of 37 of the people awaiting executions on federal death row, leaving only three men: Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, convicted in 2015 for the deadly bombing of the Boston Marathon; Dylann Roof, convicted in 2017 of killing nine worshipers at a South Carolina church; and Robert Bowers, convicted in 2023 of killing 11 people at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It can take many years for condemned prisoners to exhaust all legal avenues for challenging their death sentences, and none of the three men have yet received execution dates. Typically, when a U.S. state or the federal government adopts a new execution protocol, death row prisoners can mount legal challenges arguing that the new protocol violates the U.S. Constitution's prohibition of "cruel and unusual punishments." Such challenges have always failed at the U.S. Supreme Court, which has never previously found an adopted execution method to be unconstitutional. Lethal injection remains the most common method in the U.S., but has a higher rate of being botched than most other methods, including the single-drug protocol adopted by the federal government in 2019 using pentobarbital, a powerful barbiturate. A few executions have been aborted as prison officials struggle to find a vein on a strapped-down prisoner. Opponents of the method say autopsies of executed people's lungs show they experienced drowning before dying from the pentobarbital, which they argue amounts to a torturous death. Pharmaceutical companies refuse to sell their drugs that can be used in executions to prison systems, partly to comply with a European Union ban, forcing U.S. prisons to seek out smaller, less-regulated compounding pharmacies willing to brew copies of those drugs. This has led to several U.S. states reviving older methods in recent years. Five states have firing squads, with Idaho set to adopt it as its primary method in July, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, a nonprofit research group in Washington. Last year, South Carolina carried out the first execution by firing squad in the U.S. in 15 years after Brad Sigmon, convicted of murdering his ex-girlfriend's parents, chose the method, saying he feared the state's alternatives of the electric chair or lethal injection would risk a slower and more torturous death. In 2024, Alabama became the first state to execute someone by forcing nitrogen into their airways through a face mask, suffocating them, a method that has since been adopted by Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Oklahoma.

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The U.S. Space Force has awarded contracts worth up to $3.2 billion to 12 companies to develop space-based missile defense interceptor systems, advancing U.S. President Donald Trump's Golden Dome plan. Golden Dome, expected to cost $185 billion, envisions expanding ground-based defenses such as interceptor missiles, sensors and command-and-control systems while adding space-based elements to detect, track and potentially counter incoming threats from orbit. These would include advanced satellite networks and still-debated orbital weaponry. The Space Force granted initial prototype agreements to develop space-based interceptors capable of neutralizing missile threats shortly after launch, marking a significant shift in U.S. missile defense strategy. Unlike existing ground-based systems, the Space-Based Interceptor (SBI) program deploys weapons in orbit, enabling the U.S. military to engage and destroy threats earlier in their flight path. In late 2025 and early 2026, Space Force's Space Systems Command awarded 20 agreements to companies including SpaceX, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin and Anduril, with a potential combined award value of up to $3.2 billion to "ensure the government maintains contracting flexibility to award to the best provider," according to a statement from the Space Force. The program aims to develop a space-based missile defense interceptor system that will demonstrate an integrated capability within the Golden Dome for America architecture by 2028. The Space Force also awarded about half a dozen small Golden Dome contracts to build competing missile defense prototypes, kicking off a race for future deals worth tens of billions of dollars, Reuters reported in November.

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U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said on Friday that a U.S. blockade on Iran is going global, adding Tehran had a chance to make a "good deal" with Washington. "Our blockade is growing and going global," Hegseth told reporters. "No one sails from the Strait of Hormuz to anywhere in the world without the permission of the United States Navy," he said. Peace talks between Iran and the United States could resume soon in Pakistan, three Pakistani sources told Reuters on Friday, after the last round of talks expected earlier this week fell through. Standing next to top U.S. General Dan Caine, Hegseth said the U.S. was "not anxious" for a deal with Iran, and repeated Trump's previous comments of having "all the time in the world." "Iran knows that they still have an open window to choose wisely ... at the negotiating table. All they have to do is abandon a nuclear weapon in meaningful and verifiable ways," he said. Caine said the U.S. Central Command continues to maintain a strict blockade on all ports in Iran. Thirty-four ships had been turned around as of Friday morning, he said. The U.S. military would continue to interdict Iranian vessels in the Pacific and Indian oceans, Caine added. "We're enforcing the blockade across the board against any ship of any nationality that is transiting to or from an Iranian port or territory," Caine said. "We're closely tracking vessels of interest headed towards Iran and those moving away from Iran that were outside the blockade area when this blockade was ordered and ... we're prepared and postured to intercept them," he said. The U.S. naval blockade on Iran began on April 13. Hegseth also warned that any attempts by Iran to lay mines in the Strait of Hormuz would be a violation of the ceasefire. "Transit (of the Strait of Hormuz) is occurring, much more limited than anybody would like to see and with more risk than people would like to see, but that's because Iran is doing irresponsible things with small, fast boats ... with weapons on them," Hegseth said.

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An appeals court has blocked President Donald Trump’s executive order suspending asylum access, a key pillar of the Republican president’s plan to crack down on migration at the southern border of the U.S. A three-judge panel from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit on Friday found that immigration laws give people the right to apply for asylum at the border, and the president can’t circumvent that.

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Two buses have crashed head-on near a Pentagon bus stop, injuring 23 people, including Defense Department personnel. The Pentagon Force Protection Agency says the Omni Ride and Fairfax Connector transit buses struck each other shortly before 7:30 a.m. Friday. Emergency personnel transported 18 of the injured to local hospitals for further medical evaluation. Five were treated at the scene. Ten of the 23 injured passengers are from the Defense Department. The accident altered mass transit operations for several hours. It's unclear what caused the crash.

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Officials say a powerful storm churned up multiple tornadoes that barreled through Oklahoma, damaging at least 40 homes and sending emergency crews door-to-door in a hard hit neighborhood. The most extensive damage was in the rural town of Enid in Garfield County on Thursday night, where some homes were reduced to rubble. Video shows a rapidly moving column of air touching down along with totaled homes. The Garfield County Sheriff’s Office said there were no immediate reports of fatalities and only minor injuries hours after the tornado passed through. The mayor of Enid says some people were trapped in their homes and had to be rescued.

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