Suspect in custody after reported shooting incident outside White House Correspondents Dinner; Trump evacuated
(WASHINGTON) — President Donald Trump, first lady Melania Trump and other dignitaries were removed by security after an shooting incident outside the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner in Washington, D.C., on Saturday night.
The incident took place near the main magnetometer screening area at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, according to the Secret Service.
Trump and the other dignitaries who were evacuated were safe, according to the Secret Service. The Secret Service and the president said that a suspect has been apprehended.
Law enforcement is continuing to conduct the investigation.
This was the first correspondents’ dinner that Trump attended as president. He was scheduled to speak.
Other dignitaries who were escorted out included House Speaker Mike Johnson, and Vice President JD Vance.
Trump praised the Secret Service for their work.
“Quite an evening in D.C. Secret Service and Law Enforcement did a fantastic job. They acted quickly and bravely,” he said in a social media post.
Trump added the he “recommended that we “LET THE SHOW GO ON” but, will entirely be guided by Law Enforcement.”
“They will make a decision shortly. Regardless of that decision, the evening will be much different than planned, and we’ll just, plain, have to do it again,” he said.
White House Correspondents’ Association President Weijia Jiang told the crowd at the Washington Hilton ballroom that the program would continue at some point.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
The US Supreme Court in Washington, DC, US, on Monday, April 20, 2026. (Graeme Sloan/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
(WASHINGTON) — The Supreme Court on Wednesday ruled in favor of a U.S. Army veteran wounded in a 2016 suicide bombing in Afghanistan, allowing him to sue a military contractor for damages after it allegedly failed to supervise the attacker who was an employee.
The 6-3 decision reverses lower court rulings which had said the contractor, Fluor Corporation, was immune from lawsuits because it was operating on behalf of the U.S. government and opens the door to other damages suits against war-zone contractors for activities outside the bounds of their responsibility.
The attacker, Ahmad Nayeb, was employed by Fluor to work in a nontactical vehicle yard on Bagram Air Base under an Army contract that required the company to ensure all personnel complied with base security policies, which included their confinement to works sites and “constant view of them.”
In November 2016, Nayeb roamed the base freely for nearly an hour and used U.S. government tools to make his bomb inside the secure base, according to an Army investigation cited in court documents.
The explosion killed five and wounded 17, including then-Army Spc. Winston Hencely, who confronted the attacker just as he detonated his suicide vest. Nayeb was killed; the explosion fractured Hencely’s skull and resulted in permanent disability.
While damages claims against the U.S. government and its military contractors arising out of combatant activities are generally prohibited by federal law, Justice Clarence Thomas, writing for the court’s majority, concluded immunity does not apply to cases when “the contractor was not required or authorized to take the action at issue.”
“The government required Fluor to hire Afghan employees and to provide logistics for Bagram Airfield. But, it did not, Hencely contends, require Fluor to leave Nayeb unsupervised, allow him to walk alone for an hour after his shift, or permit him to obtain unauthorized tools with which he could build a bomb,” Thomas wrote.
The decision clears the way for Hencely to pursue a damages case against the company in federal court.
In dissent, Justices Samuel Alito and Brett Kavanaugh and Chief Justice John Roberts said while they believe Hencely deserves “a full measure of support from the American people,” a damages lawsuit is “not the way to give the petitioner what he is due.”
Alito wrote, “War is the exclusive domain of the Federal Government, but the Court [today] allows state (or foreign law) to encroach on that domain. The Constitution precludes that encroachment.”
Fluor Corp, which disputes liability for the bombing, did not immediately respond to ABC News’ request for comment on the court’s decision.
Rob Bonta, attorney general of California, from left, Kris Mayes, Arizona’s attorney general, and Dan Rayfield, Oregons attorney general, speak to members of the media outside the US Supreme Court in Washington, DC, US, on Wednesday, Nov. 5, 2025. (Photographer: Eric Lee/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
(WASHINGTON) — The Department of Homeland Security’s investigations arm is investigating 2020 election results in Arizona, the state’s attorney general, Kris Mayes, and a source familiar with the matter confirmed to ABC News on Tuesday.
It is not typical for Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) to investigate election results, though the agency has investigated voter fraud cases in the past. The agency serves as the investigative arm of DHS and usually investigates transnational crime, including drug smuggling and human trafficking.
Mayes, a Democrat, told ABC News in a statement, “The Trump administration is engaged in an unserious investigation into an election that took place six years ago based on nothing but conspiracy theories and lies. At the request of local leadership at Homeland Security Investigations, the Arizona Attorney General’s Office provided them with public records from the 2020 election investigation conducted under the prior Attorney General, Mark Brnovich. We were happy to share them, because those materials speak for themselves.”
The investigation by Brnovich, Mayes added, included “10,000 hours investigating every claim made by election deniers, from bamboo ballots imported from China to Italian spy satellites flipping votes to President Biden” and found no evidence to support any of the allegations.
“Those conclusions were true then and they remain true now. There was no evidence of widespread fraud in the 2020 election in Arizona,” Mayes wrote.
A separate source confirmed to ABC News that it’s believed HSI communicated the investigation to the attorney general a week after outgoing Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem visited an HSI office in Arizona in February.
When Noem visited Arizona in February, she was asked by reporters to identify cases of voter fraud in the state.
“I’m sure there are many of them,” she responded, without providing specifics.
A DHS spokesperson told ABC News the department could not comment on “any active investigations,” but said that HSI “is actively rooting out and investigating election fraud wherever it can be found. We have repeatedly demonstrated that illegal aliens can and do vote in our elections. Under President Trump, HSI is committed to restoring integrity to our election systems and ensuring that American citizens and only American citizens are electing American leaders.”
The Atlantic first reported the HSI investigation.
It is unclear if the HSI investigation is connected to a subpoena from the Trump administration of records related to the 2020 election in Arizona’s Maricopa County, which Arizona Senate President Warren Petersen confirmed on Monday. (The Atlantic reported that the state attorney general’s office did not believe the investigations were connected.)
The records sought under the subpoena are related to the Arizona state Senate’s audit of Maricopa County’s 2020 election results, conducted by cybersecurity firm Cyber Ninjas in 2021. That audit came to the same conclusion election officials in Maricopa County did — that President Joe Biden won the county. Both the Maricopa County Elections office and the Maricopa County Recorder’s Office told ABC News on Monday that they have not received subpoenas.
Despite the Trump administration’s efforts to relitigate the 2020 election, Biden won the election by 7 million votes, including winning six out of the seven battleground states. The overall electoral count was 306 to 232.
The investigation in Arizona comes after the FBI seized 2020 voting records from Fulton County, Georgia, while serving a search warrant in January. Fulton County officials have sought to have the files returned, arguing to a judge the FBI probe lacked “even the faintest possibility of probable cause.”
Election results in Georgia and Arizona, more broadly, have both been at the center of election conspiracies about the 2020 election.
Construction cranes are seen, from the Washington Monument, on the site of the former East Wing of the White House on April 17, 2026 in Washington, D.C. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
(WASHINGTON) — Senate Republicans unveiled a bill on Monday that would provide $400 million for President Trump’s White House ballroom project, arguing that such a space is needed following the shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, revealing their plans hours before the Department of Justice filed a scathing response to a judge’s injunction on the project.
Senior leadership of the Justice Department overnight filed a motion demanding U.S. District Judge Richard Leon dissolve the injunction he put in place in March, a ruling that said Trump couldn’t build the planned ballroom without authorization from Congress.
In an extraordinary filing, parts of which echo President Donald Trump’s social media post style, the DOJ officials repeatedly accuse the plaintiffs who brought the lawsuit of suffering from “TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME” and describes Leon’s injunction as “intolerable,” “unsustainable” and “indefensible.” It also makes a side reference to former President “Barack Hussein Obama,” using his full name in the way Trump often does.
That filing was submitted to the court hours after Republicans proposed a bill that would provide $400 million in funding for the facility, which they officials have said would feature a newly built ballroom along with military and secret service security infrastructure beneath it.
Trump has said repeatedly that the ballroom would be privately funded.
Both the court filing and the proposed legislation used Saturday’s incident, during which a suspect allegedly rushed through security at the Washington Hilton during an event where Trump was present, as part of their rationale. The suspect, Cole Allen, was charged on Monday with the attempted assassination of the president. Allen did not enter a plea during a court appearance.
“I am convinced if there had been a presidential ballroom adjacent to the White House the guy never would have gotten in,” Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who is sponsoring the legislation, said in reference to the alleged perpetrator.
Graham said it would be “insane” to hold the dinner in the Hilton in the future.
“Anybody who suggests that we have an event like this in the times in which we live in a facility like Hilton, that’s crazy,” he said. “We are going to have to accommodate the times in which we live.”
The motion was filed following a warning from the leader of DOJ’s Civil Division, Brett Shumate, to plaintiffs in a letter that was posted on Sunday on social media by acting Attorney General Todd Blanche.
ABC News asked Blanche on Sunday during a news conference about some of DOJ’s statements in the letter — specifically their determination that the Washington Hilton was a “demonstrably unsafe” site for the president and his Cabinet and whether that was evaluated prior to Saturday’s dinner.
“When he says demonstrably, it’s demonstrated by what happened on Saturday night,” Blanche responded. “So it doesn’t mean that the Secret Service were –would ever let the president go into to an unsafe environment. I know that the director of the Secret Service will be focused on making sure that we always keep him safe. And by the way, as we said before, and as anybody that was in that room knows we were safe. We were safe.”
Blanche on Sunday said that “law enforcement did not fail,” with hundreds of armed agents between the alleged would-be assassin and the president, but the overnight filing included an assertion on its fourth page that the suspect “came horrifically close.”
In their motion to the court, however, the DOJ’s top officials argued that a secure space for the president to attend large gatherings in Washington “currently does not exist” and — even though the proposed ballroom plan schedule has said it would not be completed until at least 2028 — current national security issues require it to continue construction “immediately.”
The ballroom, according to the senators who are proposing additional funding, could be a secure facility where events like Saturday’s gala could take place in the future. Graham said it would ultimately be up to the White House Correspondents’ Association whether they’d want to use the ballroom for the event, but their bill aims to give them the choice about whether to do so.
“We are going to build this facility, and I would suggest to the next president don’t go to the Hilton don’t do an event at the Hilton or any other facility outside the White House given the times in which we live,” Graham said. “The problem is you don’t have a choice. We are going to give people that choice.”
The senators are proposing to offset the cost of the ballroom by using customs fees. Their proposal follows months of assertions by Trump that the ballroom — a proposed 89,000-square-foot expansion of the White House — would be funded “at no charge to the taxpayer.” The initial proposal for the ballroom placed construction costs at an estimated $200 million, according to the White House.
Sen. Katie Britt, R-Al., said on Sunday that the ballroom was about protecting future presidents, not just Trump, since it isn’t expected to be completed until near the end of his term.
“This isn’t even about him. This will not be done until the end of his term. This is about future presidents,” Britt said. “This isa bout our nation having a place to gather where the president of the united states of America can be a part of it. This is about presidents both now and in the future.”
The funding bill would require 60 votes to pass a bill to fund the ballroom in the Senate. It seems unlikely Democrats would furnish those votes, but Graham said he’d like to put the bill up for a vote to put everyone on the record.
-ABC News’ Steven Portnoy and Katherine Faulders contributed to this report.
