WASHINGTON — The Department of Justice is investigating accused White House Correspondents’ Dinner shooter Cole Allen’s possible links to protest group “The Wide Awakes” and other leftist groups online, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche revealed Monday.
“Of course, we’re investigating that,” Blanche told a reporter at a news conference who asked about his ties to that and other left-wing groups.
“There’s a lot of people investigating this man right now, including the FBI,” he added, noting that he was aware Allen may have been a video game developer for a “shooter-style, RPG game” as well.
The Wide Awakes is a loosely affiliated group of progressives who promote marches and other activism using colorful costumes, billing themselves as a modern “remix” of an abolitionist org founded during the Civil War-era.
“We are infinite, disruptive, enlightened, visionary, accountable,” a Wide Awakes website states. “We want the radical complexity of diversity. We believe creative liberation is a game and all of us can play now and forever.”
“We can emancipate ourselves without violence,” the website adds. “We don’t need to be told what to believe or how to engage, we just need to be inspired to question what’s there. Broadening perspective yields a safer world.”
A collection of artists launched the group in 2020, and officials have said Allen considered himself a member.
The 31-year-old, would-be assassin also attended anti-Trump “No Kings” marches last month.
Family members of Allen, a teacher who attended CalTech and later received a master’s degree in computer science from California State University, told investigators that he expressed radical political beliefs and a desire to do “something” to fix the world.
His BlueSky account — where many left-of-center social media users fled after billionaire Elon Musk acquired Twitter, now X — shows he made more than 1,000 posts, many of which attacked President Trump and the GOP.
Allen arrived in Washington, DC, on April 24 and checked into the Washington Hilton after taking a train from Los Angeles by way of Chicago earlier in the week.
Follow the latest on the shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner:
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- Who are ‘The Wide Awakes,’ leftist group that WHCD suspect Cole Allen was supposedly a part of?
He was transporting a 12-gauge, pump-action shotgun, a .38-caliber semiautomatic pistol and several knives that he later used when he tried to storm into the dinner with the president, vice president and top-ranking Cabinet officials.
In a crazed manifesto emailed to his family minutes before he tried to break into the correspondents’ dinner, Allen allegedly confessed that he intended to target the president and Trump administration officials.
That manifesto was published in an affidavit accompanying a criminal complaint filed Monday against Allen in DC federal court accusing him of attempting to assassinate Trump.
Charges for transporting a firearm and ammunition across state lines with the intent to commit a felony and for discharging a firearm during a crime of violence were also listed.
Allen faces life in federal prison if convicted of attempted assassination, and 20 years upon conviction for the other charges.
He’s scheduled to appear in DC federal court Thursday for a detention hearing.
