(José Niño, Headline USA) A former Secret Service deputy director suggested the United States may need to adopt Israeli-style security measures after a gunman breached the perimeter at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday.
A.T. Smith, who served as deputy director of the Secret Service and now works as a CBS law enforcement analyst, appeared on Face the Nation the morning after the shooting. Host Margaret Brennan asked whether the country would need to shift toward a total lockdown approach for political events, noting that overseas presidential trips typically involve securing entire hotels — something that did not happen the night before on U.S. soil. “Is that the kind of thing we’re going to start seeing, that it’ll be more like an Israeli model?” Brennan asked.
Smith acknowledged the difficulty. “It’s difficult because you have obviously a hotel that’s open to the public. They have other guests that are unassociated with the event last night, and they’re gonna have to take a hard look at how you maybe screen those guests coming in. It’s very hard to necessarily know everything about everybody that’s there, but probably one safety scenario would be what you just said to more or less lock down the hotel.”
He added that such measures are not standard domestic practice. “We don’t normally do that in the United States, and usually the Secret Service is very successful at coordinating and corralling that area, like the ballroom that’s gonna be used for the event and making it secure. But again, they’ll have to take a look at that.”
The suspect, Cole Tomas Allen, 31, of Torrance, California, had checked into the Hilton as a guest before the event after traveling by train from Los Angeles via Chicago, per a report by NBC News. On Saturday evening, Allen rushed a Secret Service checkpoint armed with a shotgun, a handgun, and multiple knives. According to CBS News, he fired at agents and struck one in a bulletproof vest before being subdued.
President Donald Trump, First Lady Melania Trump, Vice President JD Vance, and several Cabinet members were rapidly evacuated and the dinner was canceled, per a report by CNN. The core vulnerability the attack exposed was that the hotel lobby remained accessible to regular guests during the high-profile event — a gap Allen had anticipated and exploited, according to his own writings.
CBS national security contributor Samantha Vinograd, who was in the room during the attack, assessed the broader implications on Face the Nation. “The paradigms of the past may not be sufficient to meet the moment,” she said, citing the threat environment posed by lone-actor radicalization.
Allen was charged Monday in federal court on three counts: attempting to assassinate the president, using a firearm during a crime of violence, and transporting a firearm in interstate commerce with intent to commit a felony. It was the first White House Correspondents’ Dinner Trump had attended as a sitting president.
José Niño is the deputy editor of Headline USA. Follow him at x.com/JoseAlNino
