It was a cross-country train ride to assassinate the president according to federal authorities, and they say the trip went straight through Chicago.
Just last week Cole Allen was Chicago-bound and “armed to the teeth,” according to federal law enforcement in a new court filing.
After changing trains at Union Station, Allen got to his Washington, DC hotel and they say he took a selfie decked out with guns and knives. Minutes later authorities say his cross country odyssey was about to end with an attempted attack on President Donald Trump and members of his cabinet attending the White House Correspondent’s dinner in the same hotel.
A close-up photo that the FBI says evidence tech’s lifted from Allen’s phone shows the accused shooter dressed in black, wearing a red necktie and sporting an ammo bag, a gun shoulder holster, a knife, wire cutters and pliers.
The array of these items, and close-ups of a half-dozen daggers and knives, a pistol and the shotgun authorities say Allen fired while running through a Secret Service checkpoint toward the president and his team a floor below, are all contained in a motion by prosecutors to hold Allen without bond.
Lugging a hard-shell suitcase, investigators say Allen packed “a veritable armament” and set out on his roughly 2,600 mile trip across America.
Allen took Amtrak’s Southwest Chief from Los Angeles on April 21 through what prosecutors call the “scenic views of mountains and deserts of the American West,” arriving in Chicago on the 24th.
He is said to have kept a diary on the four-day trip, sounding more like a travel writer than an assassin-in-waiting.
After changing trains at Union Station, Allen writes: “Chicago is cool. Kinda looks like an Iowa small town was scaled up to L.A. size.”
The day after departing Chicago, Allen arrived at the Washington Hilton, writing in his journal that he “walked in with multiple weapons and not a single person there (at the hotel) considers the possibility that (he) could be a threat.”
That has led some to question whether hotel guest luggage should be x-rayed.
“I’ve been to Russia with President (Ronald) Reagan. I know how they do business there. And I don’t think that’s the way we want to do business here if we don’t have to,” said former U.S. Secret Service agent Tim McCarthy. “If it comes to that, yes. But I heard a couple of pundits say, well, you know, the hotels are so dangerous. Well, that’s not where the typical assassination attempt has taken place.”
The one-time Secret Service, and former chief of police in south suburban Orland Park, was himself wounded in the shooting of Reagan in 1981 outside the same DC hotel. McCarthy believes Secret Service agents managed to take down the DC attacker before he punctured a close-in security perimeter.
With that, Cole Allen’s panoramic ride became a bad trip….literally…the accused attacker face planted in the hotel lobby as authorities say he was trying to execute the final leg of his plot.
Justice officials claim Allen had a “planned attack of unfathomable malice,” aimed at bringing about “one of the darkest days in American history, seeking to kill “dozens of people” and “destabilizing the entire federal government.”
Several law enforcement sources have told NBC News that ballistics testing now shows Cole Allen fired the shot that wounded a Secret Service agent last Saturday night.
Allen’s detention hearing is Thursday in Washington, DC but in a new filing his attorney claims that Allen has been fully restrained in a locked cage and can’t meet with lawyers. A D.C. judge has now ordered the accused attacker to be allowed unrestricted visits with attorneys.
