Secret Service officials on Wednesday voiced confidence in their security plan for President Donald Trump’s visit Friday to the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, which was rescheduled after a gunman tried to attack the original event in April.
In a rare briefing with reporters at the Secret Service headquarters, Director Sean Curran said officials had sent an advance team of agents to secure the event at the Waldorf Astoria and that they were taking standard steps to prepare.
“We do expect bad people to show up. It’s just the reality of where we are,” Curran said, noting that the dinner was taking place amid a surge in threats against Trump and other protectees. “But we’re treating it no different than any other site that the president goes to.”
Service officials did not provide specifics on their security plans for the event, which the White House Correspondents’ Association said last month would involve “significantly enhanced safety measures and new access procedures.”
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Officials said they viewed the thwarted attack on the April dinner as a success. But they emphasized that they didn’t see the rescheduled event as a reprise of security from the first.
“We examine every single site and we change things and get better every single time,” Deputy Director Matthew Quinn said. “We’re not looking at this as a redo of a dinner. We’re looking at this as a presidential site with Cabinet members and other protectees there, just like every other site we do everywhere we go.”
The original dinner, held April 25 at the Washington Hilton, was cut short after an armed man charged through a security checkpoint, firing his weapon and injuring a Secret Service officer before law-enforcement personnel stopped him. Trump and other officials were evacuated while many of the attendees took shelter behind tables and chairs.
The suspect, Cole Tomas Allen, pleaded not guilty in May to charges of attempting to assassinate Trump and weapons violations.
The Secret Service faced scrutiny over its security arrangements at the event, with some lawmakers questioning whether the security perimeter was sufficiently large and raising concerns about how Allen managed to book a room in the hotel. Curran briefed lawmakers privately in the days that followed, but Congress did not hold hearings on the attack.
Speaking with reporters Wednesday, Curran defended the service’s handling of security at the dinner, saying the roughly 120-yard buffer from the magnetometer checkpoint to the podium was adequate.
“How we set up that perimeter and where we ended it is where we felt comfortable, with our special teams, as to where we needed to put it,” Curran said. “We do expect things to happen at the magnetometers, unfortunately. But that’s why they are there. And that’s where it happened, and that’s where it ended. So it did work — the system worked.”
Trump is expected to speak at the rescheduled dinner, which will host fewer attendees than the original. Trump previously owned and operated the Waldorf Astoria building as the Trump International Hotel before his company sold the lease in 2022.
Service officials said that, overall, threats against protectees were running higher than at any point in recent memory. They said the agency’s protective intelligence investigations are up 40% over last year. The increase has strained agents, officers and other staffers, many of whom already work long overtime hours, according to current and former officials.
The shooting at the dinner in April was one of three shootings near the White House in the span of about a month that the Secret Service responded to — the most in recent history for the agency in such a short span. In May, service personnel shot a man who allegedly fired a gun at officers near Vice President JD Vance’s motorcade, and in a separate incident fatally shot a man who opened fire near the White House.
Last month, the Secret Service and FBI said they disrupted a plot to use drones, explosives and snipers to kill politicians and other attendees at the UFC fight held on the White House lawn. At least eight people have been arrested and charged in connection with the alleged plot.
The rescheduled correspondents’ dinner is part of a historically packed schedule of protective events the Secret Service has managed this summer that has included the July 4 fireworks celebration and other festivities around America’s 250th anniversary.
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