Good-faith skeptics and bad-faith conspiracy peddlers from TikTok live streams to Substack sleuths are flooding the online ether with lies and half-truths about the attempted assassination of President Trump and his senior team at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday night. Some, potentially motivated by TDS, insist it was a false flag operation staged by the government. Others claim there was no shooting at all and the only shots were due to friendly fire. Never mind that the Department of Justice has already charged the 31-year-old suspect (whom I won’t name) with, among other felonies, one count of “discharging a firearm during a crime of violence” — a charge that would make zero sense if he never pulled the trigger.
The central thesis for many who assert the government is lying to us about the events of April 22, including Garrett Graff, rests on the initial criminal complaint against the 31-year-old suspect. Skeptics and cynics point to the complaint’s use of passive voice, the absence of an explicit allegation or perceived audio evidence that the assailant fired the first round, the timeline, and the employment of TSA agents at magnetometers.
Graff specifically notes the absence of a charge for “assaulting a federal officer” under 18 U.S.C. § 111, which one would expect to see if someone shot a Secret Service officer. That’s a fair observation. Except, it ignores the fact that this is the initial charging document filed less than 48 hours after the incident and is designed to focus on what can be immediately proven from preliminary evidence and witness statements — how federal prosecutions are supposed to begin.
He goes on to suggest the single unaccounted shot could have been friendly fire from another federal agent. Citing the Wall Street Journal analysis showing six total shots fired on ballroom recordings, Graff argues none of them “sound to me like a shotgun” — implying the first shot wasn’t the gunman’s at all but came from a service pistol.
Well, hold on.
Nathan Howard/Getty Images
The publicly available audio does capture a distinct initial pop followed by five rapid return shots from the officer’s service weapon. A 12-gauge shotgun fired indoors is obviously loud, but so is a 9mm or .40-caliber service pistol fired in a hotel. The presence of six shots, not five, is precisely why the DOJ’s theory is that the gunman fired just once.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche has already explained the government’s early working theory of what happened: a preliminary review found an empty spent shotgun shell still inside the chamber of the 12-gauge pump-action shotgun the assailant was carrying when he sprinted through the magnetometer. A spent shell in the chamber of a pump-action shotgun is strong circumstantial evidence that it was cycled and fired. Ballistics experts are still doing the detailed work, including gunshot residue testing, trajectory mapping, and audio forensics, to confirm exactly which weapon produced the first shot.
Graff also questions the timeline and the perpetrator’s actions captured on surveillance cameras. In the video, the attacker is seen sprinting past the magnetometer, shotgun in hand. He is off camera for just a few seconds, where he would have presumably readied his weapon before firing.
Graff argues that there simply would not be enough time for him to bring his shotgun to bear, and fire at close range — something he calls “challenging” for “someone even far more experienced with firearms than [defendant] appears to be.”
Yet, the entire sequence from breach to tackle was recounted by eyewitnesses, body-worn cameras (standard for Uniformed Division officers), and venue security. While the video doesn’t show the exact trigger pull, the audio, the spent casing, the officer’s vest impact, subsequent injury, and the shooter’s immediate arrest with a loaded shotgun and .38-caliber pistol help shape the story as more evidence comes to light.
Acting AG Blanche has been explicit, saying more forensic examination is underway. On Monday, U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro reinforced that these are just the initial charges by saying, “More to come.”
The American public can expect the complaint to be superseded with additional details from the ballistics report and full video review. You can bank on one of the additional charges being §111, “assault against a federal officer.”
Perhaps his weakest point, Graff notes that TSA personnel were helping run some of the magnetometers — a fact he presents as evidence that the Secret Service was “overstretched.” Well, speaking as a former Homeland Security official, I know firsthand that supplemental screening by partner federal agencies is routine for mega-events like the Correspondents’ Dinner, which requires layered security. That is standard interagency support.
Those who say the DOJ may be “misleading the public” or exaggerating the threat to keep the events of April 25 “scary or threatening” are belied by the investigation’s transparency: releasing the complaint quickly, the president and DOJ officials’ late-night press conference hours after the shooting, and the Acting AG’s daily interviews or press conferences every day since.
Six gunshots, an injured officer, a suspect tackled with two loaded firearms, the pre-attack email signed “‘Friendly Federal Assassin’ Allen,” the manifesto found in his hotel room, and his cross-country train trip specifically for this event don’t simply vanish because the first complaint was conservatively worded or because ballistics work takes time.
Americans can and should be skeptical about what the U.S. government tells us — we’ve been lied to in the past — but the facts in this case simply don’t fit the fiction that TikTok investigators or Substack sleuths are serving up.
Skepticism is wise, sanity is essential.
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Tricia McLaughlin served as the Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs at the Department of Homeland Security. Follow her on X: @TriciaOhio
