U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro, D.C.’s top federal prosecutor, said Sunday that ballistic evidence shows the alleged assailant at the White House correspondents’ dinner shot at a Secret Service officer.
“We now can establish that a pellet that came from the buckshot from the defendant’s Mossberg pump-action shotgun was intertwined with the fiber of the vest of the Secret Service officer,” Pirro told CNN’s “State of the Union.”
She added: “It’s definitely his bullet.”
Pirro said the alleged shooter, Cole Tomas Allen, “had every intention” to kill the officer. She described the April 25 shooting as a “premeditated, violent act calculated to take down the president and anyone who was in the line of fire.”
Pirro’s comments represented the most detailed description yet of evidence supporting Justice Department officials’ public statements alleging Allen fired his weapon at an officer. The comments also went further than what prosecutors have said in court filings.
Allen, a 31-year-old tutor from Torrance, California, has been charged with attempting to assassinate the president, transporting firearms across state lines and discharging one of them during a violent crime. Pirro told reporters the night of the incident that the suspect also would be charged with assault on a federal officer with a dangerous weapon, but that count did not appear in the criminal complaint filed in court.
On Thursday, Pirro posted video to social media that she said showed Allen shooting the Secret Service officer moments before Allen’s arrest. She shared the footage following questions from Allen’s defense attorneys and independent experts about the details of the incident. The Secret Service officer, who is not identified by name in court records, was shot once in the chest while wearing a bulletproof vest and was not seriously injured, officials have said.
The court set a hearing for Allen on Monday at noon before Magistrate Judge Zia M. Faruqui. Allen’s defense team had filed a motion asking that he be removed from suicide watch and suicide-prevention measures, which included a 24-hour lockdown and other restrictions. Allen is being held at a jail in the District, and the restrictions on him were placed by the D.C. Department of Corrections.
An assistant U.S. attorney, Jocelyn Ballantine, wrote in a court filing Wednesday that “the government’s investigation is ongoing and its analysis of the crime scene evidence and recovered ballistics evidence is not yet complete.” That filing said that the officer saw Allen fire a shotgun, which had a spent cartridge in the chamber, and that investigators had found what appeared to be a buckshot pellet at the scene. Several officers heard the shotgun being fired, Ballantine wrote.
While speaking to CNN on Sunday, Pirro said the officer “will tell you himself that he was shot at.”
Speaking to NBC News’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday, acting attorney general Todd Blanche said only that the investigation is ongoing and that he expects Pirro and her team to continue the work to understand Allen’s motives.
“I don’t have an update to provide you beyond the fact that we are working hard,” he said. “I expect in the next week or so, there will be more information coming out.”
An indictment is forthcoming, he said.
Samuel Oakford contributed to this report.
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