Around 2 p.m. on April 6, officials say, Cole Tomas Allen opened the browser on his cellphone and searched: “white house correspondents dinner 2026.”
There would have been plenty to read, about how President Donald Trump was coming for the first time and how his attendance was drawing protests from hundreds of journalists. He would have also found that the dinner was scheduled for April 25 at the Washington Hilton.
Mr. Allen had apparently learned enough. About 90 minutes later, he received a confirmation email from the Hilton for the room he had booked from April 24 to 26.
These details were included in a memo that prosecutors filed in federal court on Wednesday, arguing that Mr. Allen posed “an uncommonly serious danger” and should be held in jail pending his trial on multiple charges, including the attempted assassination of the president. Mr. Allen is scheduled to appear in court on Thursday, where a judge will rule on whether to hold him in detention.
The prosecution memo described much of what the country has already learned: that the suspect, a tutor from California with a significant background in engineering and technology, was subdued by Secret Service officers after he charged the security gates at the dinner. Officials said he was armed with a 12-gauge pump action shotgun, a .38 caliber pistol, two knives and four daggers. It included the text of the email he sent minutes before the attack, explaining why he felt compelled to act and whom he was targeting.
The memo also provided the most thorough account yet of Mr. Allen’s actions in the days and hours before the attack, when, having given made-up excuses to his friends and family, he took a train across the country, “armed to the teeth” and set on carrying out an act “of unfathomable malice” in Washington.
Mr. Allen booked a one-way ticket on Amtrak for April 21, from Los Angeles to Washington. He brought with him the shotgun, which he had purchased in August 2025, and the pistol, which he had bought in October 2023, along with extra magazines and cartridges, the memo said. Law enforcement would later say they found a “respirator, a roll of duct tape and two rolls of grip tape” in his hotel room, along with two additional knives.
As he crossed the United States, Mr. Allen read articles on his phone about the dinner and the controversy surrounding Mr. Trump’s appearance, according to the court filing. He also wrote a note in his phone, making observations about the country that he watched unspool outside his window.
He remarked on the “wind turbines looming like snowy mountains” as he crossed the desert in New Mexico, expressed approval of Chicago — “kinda like an Iowa small town was scaled up to L.A. size” — and compared Pennsylvania forests to “vast fairy lands filled with tiny trickling creeks in spring.”
On Friday, April 24, at approximately 1:10 p.m., Mr. Allen arrived in Washington. He took a Metro train from Union Station to Dupont Circle. And at 3:15 p.m., he checked into the Washington Hilton.
At some point, Mr. Cole had written a series of emails to friends, family members and an employer, which he scheduled to send shortly before the attack, according to the memo. The emails varied depending on the recipients — to his employer, he wrote, “consider me to be submitting my resignation effective immediately” — but to all of them he had attached a text file labeled, “Apology and Explanations.”
“Hello everybody!” he began. The attached text offered apologies to family members, colleagues, students and “all of the people I traveled next to, all the workers who handled my luggage.”
It laid out his motives and his intended targets and also included a list of possible objections to his plans and his answers to each. In a postscript “apparently written from inside the Washington Hilton,” the prosecution memo read, Mr. Allen described what he saw as flaws in the security at the hotel.
The day of the dinner, the memo said, Mr. Allen was in and out of his hotel room, but keeping track of the president’s schedule online. Just after 8 p.m., as guests in tuxedos and gowns were filling the ballroom, Mr. Allen posed for a selfie in his hotel room mirror. He wore a black shirt and a red necktie tucked into his black pants. He also appeared to be wearing a shoulder holster, a sheathed knife and the small leather bag that would later be found to be full of ammunition.
At around 8:15 p.m., the memo said, Mr. Allen left his hotel room, repeatedly checking his cellphone to follow news reports of the president’s arrival at the hotel. At 8:28 p.m., he typed “trump white house correspondents dinner” into a search engine, nearly the same words he had typed 19 days earlier when he was back home in California.
Around 8:30 p.m., the emails he had scheduled were sent.
“Shortly thereafter,” the memo read, “the defendant rushed the screening checkpoint on the terrace level of the Washington Hilton with a raised shotgun.”
Campbell Robertson reports for The Times on Delaware, the District of Columbia, Kentucky, Maryland, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and West Virginia.
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