The puzzle around Cole Allen, failed against Donald Trump, begins to be completed. Minutes before trying to break into the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, Allen took an armed selfie in front of the mirror in his room at the Hilton Hotel, where he had stayed on Friday and in whose basement a gala was held that brings together power and the press every spring in Washington.
The photo was released this Wednesday by the authorities. Allen faces three crimes, the most serious of which is the attempted assassination of the president of the United States. For this crime he faces a sentence of life imprisonment.
According to the court document in which he filed, Allen used his phone to take a photo in the mirror of his room on Saturday at 8:03 p.m. (2:03 a.m. on Sunday in mainland Spain), about 30 minutes before the assassination attempt.
The defendant is wearing a black shirt and pants, with a red tie, and appears to be carrying a small bag with ammunition, a shoulder holster, and a sheathed knife, as well as pliers and wire cutters.
The new official documents also contain photographs of the weapons that were seized from him when he was arrested: a Mossberg .12 caliber shotgun, a .38 Rock Island Armory pistol, ammunition, two knives and four daggers.
The Prosecutor’s Office presented this evidence before the federal Court of the District of Columbia with the aim of convincing the judge at a hearing next Thursday to keep the detainee in preventive detention without bail while awaiting trial.
According to the Prosecutor’s account, Allen planned for weeks. On April 6, he booked the room at the Hilton. On the 21st, he left his house.
To hatch his plan, always according to the authorities, he investigated information about the Correspondents’ Dinner, one of the most important events on the Washington calendar, to which Trump, along with a good part of his Government and some 2,300 guests, was scheduled to attend for the first time as president. Allen was scheduled to leave his room Sunday morning. By then, he had already entered the history of political violence in this country, and was detained by the authorities.
Allen, 31, traveled by train and bus from California to the city of Washington. He left Torrance, a town of 150,000 inhabitants near Los Angeles. On his journey, he passed through Chicago, and from there he jumped, always by land, to the American capital. The fact that he crossed the border of several states carrying weapons, which he acquired legally, is a federal crime, punishable with a maximum sentence of 10 years.
Before the attack, he programmed the automatic sending of a series of emails in which he apologized to his relatives and those he might encounter on his way, explained his motives, acknowledged that he was willing to kill as many members of the Government as possible (“from highest to lowest rank”) and assumed that the rest of the guests could be “acceptable collateral damage”, although he dismissed them as adjectives. In that “manifesto,” as Trump defined it, he presented himself as “the kind federal killer.”
A video published this Wednesday by The Washington Post offered the clearest image to date of the moment when Allen tried to run through a security center on the floor immediately above the floor where the gala, chaired by Trump, was being held. In those images, he appears to be pointing at a Secret Service agent. In the video, which lasts just four seconds, you can see how another agent shoots the accused at least four times.
It is important to know whether or not Allen had time to fire his weapons, because the third of the crimes he faces depends on that being proven. For this, he could get another 10 years. Sentences in the United States are cumulative.
