Keystone Kash and His FBI Not Sure Who Shot Who at the Hilton

Three days after the White House Correspondents’ dinner, Keystone Kash's FBI is still unsure who shot a Secret Service officer during the assassination attempt outside the Hilton ballroom. The Secret Service officer was wearing a bulletproof vest, but sources say investigators haven’t found the fragment that pierced it — and can’t definitively say whether it came from the suspect.  Bottom line: investigators are still unable to say for certain whether the armed attacker shot the officer or how he was injured.

Law enforcement agents on the scene Saturday initially believed Cole Tomas Allen, the suspect who breached the dinner’s final checkpoint, fired his shotgun and struck the officer with buckshot from his weapon.  A check of Allen’s shotgun showed that he discharged one shell but did not reload, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche told reporters Monday. 

In its review, a Secret Service team estimated that Allen was running nine miles an hour and then stumbled somehow and fell a few yards past the checkpoint. That raises the question among law enforcement professionals of how a person moving that fast could have stopped, turned around, and fired his weapon at an officer behind him.

At a Monday news conference, Blanche said Allen had been charged with discharging a firearm during a crime of violence because the FBI determined he fired a single shell from the shotgun he was carrying.  But he said authorities were not prepared to say whether that was the shot that hit the Secret Service agent’s body armor.

Blanche said investigators also determined that the agent who was shot fired five rounds at Allen, none of which hit the suspect. He said they could not be sure those were the only rounds fired by law enforcement officers.  But this contradicts the Secret Service, who said its investigators collected the firearms of all Secret Service officers and agents on the scene and found no evidence that anyone else fired their weapons, a law enforcement official said.

Hopefully, the FBI will get its act together before tomorrow's hearing.