Cole Tomas Allen, the 31-year-old man charged with trying to assassinate President Trump last Saturday in Washington, will remain in jail while the case against him proceeds.
Mr. Allen, who was arrested while trying to reach a press gala the president was attending, was back in federal court on Thursday morning, and during a brief hearing, he said he was not seeking to be released.
Federal prosecutors say that Mr. Allen was armed with a shotgun and other weapons when he burst through a Secret Service checkpoint at the Washington Hilton, where the White House Correspondents’ Association was holding its annual dinner, with President Trump and many of his cabinet secretaries in attendance.
Shots were fired during the confrontation, and a Secret Service officer was struck in his protective vest, which stopped the projectile. No one else was injured during the incident, which led to the postponement of the correspondents’ dinner, the first that Mr. Trump had attended as president.
At the hearing on Thursday morning, Mr. Allen addressed the court quietly when asked if was consenting to remaining in custody. “Yes, Your Honor,” he told Magistrate Judge Moxila A. Upadhyaya of the U.S. District Court.
Mr. Allen could seek release at a later time, and prosecutors asked the judge to conduct a full hearing to allow them to lay out their arguments for why Mr. Allen should be detained. But Judge Upadhyaya, rejected the request, saying such a hearing would be “inefficient.”
“The defendant is agreeing to be detained,” the judge said, pointing out that if Mr. Allen who is from Torrance, Calif., challenged his detention at some point in the future, it would likely be before a different judge.
In a memo filed on Wednesday, the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington said that Mr. Allen took a cross- country trip from Los Angeles to Washington with the aim of carrying out “a planned attack of unfathomable malice.”
Shortly before he rushed the security checkpoint, Mr. Allen sent an email to friends and family, explaining why he was carrying out the attack and listing his targets, the memo said. When he was subdued and taken into custody, he had a shotgun, a handgun, two knives and four daggers and extra ammunition. More knives and ammunition were found in his hotel room, prosecutors said.
Mr. Allen is being represented by a federal defender, and in a court filing responding to the government’s, Mr. Allen’s lawyers said that he had no criminal history and was “a devout Christian,” with a prestigious educational background. His lawyers pointed out that he was not carrying automatic or semiautomatic weapons, “the hallmarks of the modern day mass shooting,” and that he had used buckshot, as he said in the letter to friends and family, to “minimize casualties.”
Mr. Allen’s lawyers also said that he was being held in a “safe cell” on 24-hour lockdown, and they asked the judge to order the jail to hold him in less restrictive conditions. The judge said she did not think she has the authority to override the jail’s judgment, but asked his lawyers to submit their arguments.
A preliminary hearing is scheduled for May 11.
Campbell Robertson reports for The Times on Delaware, the District of Columbia, Kentucky, Maryland, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and West Virginia.
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