Inside The Chaos At White House Correspondents’ Dinner

0:00Good day from Washington, D.C. here, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Wow, what a weekend. This is a special edition of the 1600. We're coming on the air today after a pretty insane weekend down here in the nation's capital. We were in town for the White House Correspondents' Dinner, which ended early before dinner was even served, after an apparent lone gunman was able to breach security at the Hilton here in D.C. He did not make it into the actual ballroom where we all were, but he certainly made it through at least the outer perimeter. And, yeah, it was something. We just wanted to come on the air today and sort of talk about what we saw, what we experienced.

0:45You know, from where I was sitting at table nine, which was sort of pretty close to the dais on sort of the right side of the room, which is a huge room. So my experience was it felt like I heard sort of a crash. I explained this to some reporters who asked me outside last night. It felt like somebody had broken a glass or like a food tray or something. And then you heard pop, pop, pop, pop, which suggested, you know, having covered many active shooter situations in my life, it felt like this was now an active shooter in the ballroom. Thankfully, there wasn't one in the ballroom. But I was able to, you know, we saw officers with their guns drawn on the perimeter of the room.

1:31Everybody sort of hit the deck. We went under the tables. And then when I looked up, I saw the Secret Service with the long guns, with the big machine guns on the tables and on the dais. At that point, they had evacuated President Trump, J.D. Vance and the rest of the VIPs who were on stage. So, yeah, I mean, as I was saying again last night, if you watch the video that we put out on Instagram, we, because of where we were inside, you know, sort of an ironic situation where you have all these journalists together, but there's no cell phone service in there and nobody knew what was going on because whatever was happening was happening outside the ballroom within the hotel.

2:09So, yeah, I knew less than the reporters who were interviewing me outside of the hotel last night. But, you know, scary moment. It didn't feel it felt more surreal than actual. You know, I want to hear from Jesus and Leo to see if they had the same reaction. But to me, it felt less of a, you know, imminent danger and more of just a sort of surreal experience of seeing all of these people kind of drop down and then feeling like, are we doing this again? Right. This was this was you know, we don't know what this guy's motive was. It sounds like from the reporting here on Sunday morning was that he had at least, you know, quote unquote Trump officials in his in his sights.

2:51So that will make this the third the third assassination attempt of this presidency. Not even really of the presidency, at least even just in the last couple of years, which is, you know, we talked about it after Charlie Kirk was killed in September. Remember, this is a country that is brimming with hatred, armed to the teeth. And you put those things together and you're going to get situations like this, unfortunately. But Leo, I want to talk to you, if you could come in here, because you were sitting at the other tables. You weren't with me. We had just seen each other. You had just pointed out Marco Rubio was coming in.

3:29So this was like at the beginning of the night, right? Walk me through sort of your recollection. Yeah, I mean, this was the first 10 minutes of the dinner. Basically, we were at table 13, which was closer to the exits. So I actually heard it a lot louder, I believe, than what you did. So it was actually pretty scary. You heard the gunshots? I heard a loud boom. I didn't know if it was an explosion or if it was gunshots. But everyone went down immediately in our table. it did feel a little bit more like like scary i don't i don't know how it was over there but we actually did go under the table under our table and we stayed there for about 10 minutes trying to figure out if it's safe what's going on um if are there multiple people doing this is this a false alarm we didn't know but then and remember there were no there were no announcements right so there's you have 3 000 people in this ballroom with essentially no cell phone service and they're not giving us anything over the PA.

4:32So it's just, what can you see? What can you hear from your neighbor kind of thing, right? Yeah, I mean, zero announcements. All you heard was like yelling from the Secret Service, trying to get people out. And then I did hear at one point, which was something that like confused me because I heard somebody yelling USA, USA. And I didn't know if it was protesters because we did see some protesters before entering the hotel. So I didn't know if it was protesters, what was going on. But then eventually we realized what was going on and then they evacuated. It turns out that was Dan Scavino doing that USA chant I saw on Twitter.

5:06Yeah. But it didn't work. Right. Yeah, I didn't know what was going on with that. So then they evacuated us. And the thing that struck me the most, and this was from the beginning, before I even went in, that when we were coming into the building, there was absolutely no security, no scanners. There were guards, but they didn't really even care of checking your ticket or anything. They were just letting people in. I mean, honestly, like anybody could just say, like, I'm going to the WHCA dinner and just walk right in. And that's because, OK, there's a hotel. So there's guests from the hotel and things like that.

5:47But most of the building was completely unsecured. Like you didn't go through scanners. The scanners were just You know feet away from The ballroom and that's actually Where the guy breached You know he breached security And ran towards the ballroom So this is an important point and I don't know I haven't even seen much of the coverage so I don't know if it's getting Picked up or not and it's not to be Conspiratorial or anything but it is to point out That we were it was notable enough that we Had said something I forget if I was saying it to you Or Jesus but when we were in The line on the way in thinking to myself, it's kind of weird that you can just walk right into, I mean, the President of the United States and the entire cabinet, for most part, is going to be in this event in the next hour or two.

6:29And you can just walk, you can walk through the hotel, through the lobby, down the escalators. You don't hit the mags, like you said, until you're almost, and keep in mind, this ballroom is like deep in the bowels of this hotel, which is a huge hotel, right? And this hotel, again, has some history. This is where John Hinckley tried to kill Reagan, right, right outside where we were. So this is I guess the second botched assassination attempt in this very venue. But the point of the magnetometer is not being anywhere at the perimeter of the building.

7:17and supplies in store and on menards.com. Plus, check out the weekly flyer for more great deals happening now. Save big money at Menards. Building was notable to me because I was saying to one of you guys, you know, I went to a Knicks game a couple weeks ago. They don't even let you walk into the arena before getting, you know, you have to get magged at the outside perimeter. So the idea that there would be, you know, more security to get into a basketball game than a, you know, a dinner where the president, the vice president and half the cabinet is going to be sitting together did strike me as a little bit a little bit bizarre.

7:56And having been to other events where the president of the United States has been there in the past, the perimeter is usually much bigger and much stronger. So I think maybe because of the fact that this was this is a working hotel, there's only so much they can do. They can't shut the whole thing down, which, again, I guess probably speaks to the president's point about we actually do need this ballroom in the White House. Who knows how true that is? But having just witnessed this, been a part of this, it's hard to imagine how they're going to be able to secure something like that again going forward.

8:28Right. Yeah. For people that don't know, the Hilton Ballroom is the biggest ballroom in D.C. There's no other ballroom that fits that many. It's huge. Yeah, exactly. You know, other cities may have more ballrooms, but D.C., you know, it's not that big of a city in terms of, like, area. And, yeah, that's the only ballroom. So to your point, a lot of people are going to be talking about that. And not only that, also what you said. I've covered dozens of campaign rallies, of events with Trump, with other cabinet officials. And there's always, always security outside. You have to go through scanners outside.

9:06sometimes you even have to like wait like you know get in like three hours before the president even arrives so they'll kick you out they'll do a sweep let you back in it didn't have that that sense last night at all and i don't know their i don't know what the what the discussion is if this was a big security lapse it certainly feels like it i don't even know where they took this guy down if it was a but do we have a sense of that was it a sort of when you come in or was Was it closer? It was closer to the escalators on like the second level, but he was very close. Like that's literally feet away from the ballroom.

9:41Well, and you can see in the security footage that they put out that he just plowed. He just runs right through the checkpoint and they don't even see him until he's already gone. So obviously there's going to be serious questions for Secret Service for Metro PD, but mostly Secret Service, about how this guy was even able to get into this building, let alone armed with multiple weapons. I do want to ask Jesus a little bit about his experience. He had a little bit more of a light—I don't want to say lighter, but an interesting experience in this. Well, okay, guys, as you said, it was a very weird night.

10:18I think that everyone was happy to be there. You could see, even in the faces of the cabinet, that people were very happy. Like, this is the first time that President Trump was going to be at the dinner in this administration and also in the last one. And they were—they looked very happy to be there. You could feel—we saw a lot of the politicians in Washington, D.C. very happily there. We saw Senator John Fetterman. We saw Mike Johnson. We saw the Secretary of State, Marco Rubio. And they looked happy to be in this dinner. But suddenly, well, the situation changed very rapidly. I was just coming back from the bathroom when the shooting started.

10:58I think CNN's Wolf Blitzer was the one who saw the shooter in the lobby where he just crashed the security. And I was just coming back. I saw Wolf just walking to the bathroom, and I was just coming back to my table when the things started to get crazy. And I didn't understand why a lot of plates were crashing out, like the tables were going down people were just uh putting on their knees and well it took a while for me to understand what was going on because for me this is the first time that i that i was in a active shooter situation and well and something that i have told many many friends that have spoken with me that have texted me worried about me is that inside the room you actually didn't know anything like we didn't have any clue of what was going on something that it was very odd for me is that the protocol of evacuation was very odd.

11:53Like no one really knew exactly what was going on. And it took a while to understand if we had to leave, we had to stay there. Actually, it was the Secret Service who was pushing people out. No one from the Hilton security, no one from any other agency. So those are like the thoughts that I had. We saw Erica Kirk crying. I was just coming outside of the building and I saw Erica Kirk crying. She was terrified. You can tell why. But apart from that, well, it was a night to remember, sadly. But, well, it is what it is. So I'll say this about President Trump. And we, you know, we criticize him on the show and on the newsletter many, often, met for many times, for many reasons, which he often deserves.

12:40But I will say this. He handled what happened last night, I thought, with aplomb. They evacuated him out of the hotel. But he was here at the White House within an hour in his tux with Kash Patel, the FBI director, and the acting attorney general standing behind him with the press was all in there, evening gowns and tuxedos in there. He was talking. He talked openly about what had happened. Somebody asked him, Why does this keep happening to you, Mr. President? And he made what I thought was a cogent point that presidents who do a lot, for better or worse, are the ones who get the most death threats and the most attempts on their life.

13:24Because, say what you will about Donald Trump, but he's a great man of history at this point. We've talked about this in the newsletter. You can hate him and still appreciate that he will go down as a world historical figure. And there's a lot of people in a country of ours that, you know, with as many guns as we have and as many sort of crazy people as we have, I think, unfortunately, this is just always going to be a way of life now. But for the president, I thought that he handled it well. I thought that he, you know, he spoke well of the press. You know, this is an, you know, he obviously doesn't always like us.

13:59He does. He makes no bones about that. But he spoke warmly about the media and how it was important for him that we do it again, that he come to whenever it's rescheduled. So I thought that was nice to hear. It was a rare moment of unity in this city that could use a little more of that that we saw last night. And I think that's probably the upshot of what was otherwise a scary and thankfully not catastrophic, not tragic weekend. So we'll sign off here now from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C. Let's get the boys in the picture here. Okay, 1600 boys signing off from Washington. We'll see everybody back in New York this week.

14:45I'm staying here.