Reporter’s Notebook: Inside the White House Correspondents’ dinner

WASHINGTON—I was munching on dinner rolls and a spring pea salad in the Washington Hilton ballroom at the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner Saturday night when I heard five gunshots. I dove to the floor, along with other journalists in tuxedos and evening gowns. Big band music jarringly continued playing for several seconds while guests scrambled and dishes crashed.

“It might have been just a dinner tray,” some people suggested while cautiously crouching around the tables.

But the army of Secret Service agents swarming the room and running over tables and chairs told us something serious had happened. No one could tell immediately whether the threat was in the room with us.

The Washington Hilton has hosted the WHCA dinner for 57 years. The annual gathering collects reporters, celebrities, politicians, and elected officials for what is commonly called “nerd prom,” a fancy dinner and a late night of speeches, awards, and after-party celebrations. It was my first time attending, and this year, it lasted approximately 30 minutes.

I had arrived a block away from the Washington Hilton and held a coat over my head in the rain and a dinner ticket in my hand, which allowed me past a police line. A group of protesters yelled at me and other guests, saying we were “fascist protectors.” A woman in a pink shirt offered me a sheet of “real questions” to ask the president. Other hotel guests with suitcases were also permitted in. Several media outlets and other organizations were also hosting pre-party receptions in other areas of the hotel, and their guests needed to show an email or screenshot of an invitation.

I quickly found the coat check and found my group. We chatted in the hotel bar until it was time to head down two flights of stairs to the ballroom. At the top of the escalators, hotel staff checked to make sure I had a ticket. At the next level, I passed through a metal detector and had my clutch bag searched. Then we walked down one more flight of stairs to enter the ballroom and find our table.

This was the first WHCA dinner that President Donald Trump attended. Presidents first began attending the annual dinner in 1924, and it became tradition for them to lightly roast the reporters and news outlets covering them and for the press to do so back. But during his first term, Trump refused to attend. His change of heart this time encouraged some attendees to come to a dinner they had skipped for years. Bingo sheets laid on the chairs previewed several expected negative remarks the president would make, such as insulting female journalists and particular news outlets. In remarks on the red carpet before the dinner, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the president’s speech would be harsh and “shots will be fired.”

What Leavitt meant as a figure of speech turned out to be literal, as we guests soon discovered. At the first gunshot, a C-SPAN camera operator ducked his head but kept rolling the camera, one of the only ones allowed in the room. My table was in the back of the cavernous ballroom and near a wall, so I pushed my chair to shield me and quickly started a video on my phone, holding it above my head.

Mike, a guard with a private security company called Watkins Security, heard someone yell “Close the door!” And he did. He could smell gunsmoke. He stood in front of the door, not allowing anyone through but answering reporters’ frantic questions about what he saw and heard. But Mike also didn’t know what had happened. He told me there might be a body behind him, but he wasn’t sure.

Official word was hard to come by. There was little to no cell reception that far underground and in a room of 2,500 people. Reporters tried to call loved ones and sources as they switched from being dinner guests to on-the-scene correspondents. I saw the head table with the president and Vice President J.D. Vance evacuated first. Then I saw officers escort Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his wife out. One man near the front of the room attempted to start a “USA” chant, but it didn’t catch on.

From the outset, information was contradictory. Some said a gunman was killed. That turned out to be false. Federal authorities identified Cole Tomas Allen, 31, as the suspect. Despite the barrage of shots I heard, Allen was uninjured and taken into custody. One Secret Service officer was hit in his vest but recovering. Officials have not verified whether they believe Allen shot him or if he was hit with friendly fire from other agents.

Hotel security started to yell at guests to leave the ballroom. But organizers at the head table went to the microphone to inform the room that the program would continue shortly. Hotel security officers then looked at each other confusedly.

During major political events, a designated survivor from within the administration is chosen in the unlikely event that a catastrophe kills the president and the line of succession. But a social event is often not subject to the tradition, although for security reasons Trump and Vance are often not in the same location. On Saturday night, they sat at the same table. House Speaker Mike Johnson, second in line, sat near the front. The next in line would be the Senate pro tempore, Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, who is 92 years old and was not at the dinner. I counted 10 Cabinet secretaries and acting secretaries in attendance out of 15.

Chaos reigned. Some lawmakers, such as House Majority Whip Tom Emmer, R-Minn., and Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., were evacuated quickly. Others, like Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., wandered around. When I exited the building roughly an hour later, Rep. Mike Lawler, R-N.Y., was right behind me and wondering how to get to his car. It seemed that the Secret Service evacuated whichever lawmakers they could find, but some fell through the cracks. I saw a team escort Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought out of the room roughly 30 minutes after the shooting.

“My editors want content right now?” one man said, exasperated, to me as we both searched for a cell signal.

One C-SPAN camera panned to me in my green evening gown, phone to one ear and a finger plugging the other as I tried to get information to WORLD’s breaking news team. Nearly every reporter in the room was trying to do the same, and some were starting video reports for the evening news right from where they stood.

Nearly an hour after the first shot, and after three announcements that the program would continue, WHCA President and CBS News correspondent Weijia Jiang announced that due to security protocols, we all had to leave. And Trump would make a statement in the White House press briefing room in 30 minutes, she said. At that, women took off their shoes and started running the 1 ½ miles to the White House or to an available car, and staffers from the White House press room also began to rush for the doors.

I hadn’t included my White House press badge in my small clutch, so I exited the hotel in search of an open bar with cell service to start filing stories and uploading photos and videos. The streets were gridlocked while more law enforcement arrived. I passed Transportation Security Administration agents, U.S. Marshals, and other uniformed officers. Reporters interviewed each other about their experiences as they exited and set up cameras on the sidewalks around the hotel to produce stories for the evening news.

My coat is still in the coat check room, now closed off as part of an ongoing federal investigation. I returned to the hotel the next day to record a segment for The World and Everything in It, and other reporters also filed stories. We’re turning from remembering the event to analyzing it.

The alleged gunman, Allen, checked into the hotel as a guest at least a day before, with a shotgun, a pistol, and several knives. According to unnamed law enforcement officials, he ran down 10 flights of stairs, bypassing high traffic areas. He then burst out into a corridor as Secret Service agents were taking down the only metal detectors anyone had to pass through.

It was the first and only Secret Service checkpoint, and he did not make it through. But lawmakers are questioning whether security was strict enough. Several Cabinet officials attended pre-parties on other hotel floor levels that did not have any security checkpoint beyond a visual check for a ticket. The Secret Service was only responsible for securing the dinner, but guests like Lawler questioned whether there should have been secure entry in the hotel lobby or even outside instead.

On Sunday, Grassley scheduled a briefing with Secret Service leadership and Judiciary Committee ranking member Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., to learn what happened. The House Oversight Committee has also requested a briefing. Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., noted that the Department of Homeland Security is still not funded. The U.S. Secret Service is an agency within DHS, meaning agents have missed paychecks or received emergency paychecks via executive order for the past two months.

While I left the building, shivering without my coat and trying to find a way out of the perimeter, a drunk man complimented my dress. Another man yelled out “staged, just like the first one!” I found some friends at a bar, tuned in to the president’s remarks, and started writing my notes about what happened that night.