Assassin Wasn’t on FBI’s Radar, Sources Say
Leaked Cole Allen resume + former friends shed light on alleged attacker
Cole Allen was never flagged by the FBI’s sprawling domestic counterterrorism apparatus, sources including a senior FBI official tell me. The 31-year-old alleged gunman who attempted to penetrate the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday was, by all appearances, a normal guy — until he wasn’t.
Allen himself was reportedly stunned by what he called the “insane” lack of security at the Washington Hilton — a venue that has hosted the dinner for decades (and was the site of the attempt on Ronald Reagan’s life in 1981). Video shows that after the guests were seated, the Secret Service agents and DC Metropolitan Police security people were just shooting the shit as Allen ran by.
Now, rumors are already swirling that Allen is some anti-Christian zealot aided by a network of left-wing compatriots. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche says the FBI is looking into whether Allen was operating alone. But who was he, exactly? And what does he represent?
The answer, drawn from a copy of his resume I obtained and interviews with people who knew him, is unsettling in its ordinariness.
Allen graduated from Caltech in 2017— the Pasadena STEM powerhouse behind 24 Nobel laureates and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. With a Mechanical Engineering degree, he went to work for IJK Controls LLC, a small Southern California engineering firm, where he worked on the kind of precision hardware that keeps cameras and sensors stable on moving platforms — the technology used in drones, satellites, and military targeting systems — as well as software for beaming data between devices using laser beams instead of radio waves.
Before Caltech, he'd interned at a biomedical startup, designing 3D-printed casings for medical devices and building the specialized clamps and fixtures used to attach electrodes during manufacturing.
He also made video games — not modded existing ones, but built them from the ground up. His most notable project, Bohrdom, was entirely his own: the underlying physics system that governed how objects moved and collided, 750 original graphics, and a score he composed himself.
Former classmates say this feat wasn’t uncommon at tech-savvy Caltech, where seniors often build elaborate puzzle-games for underclassmen — a tradition called “Ditch Day Stack.” Allen, by all accounts, threw himself into that endeavor.
“He seemed proud of it,” one former classmate told me.
The Allen his classmates describe was studious, devout, and polite.
“He was pretty prominent at the Caltech Christian Fellowship,” one acquaintance and former classmate told me. “Pretty Christian and mellow.”
“If I didn’t see his face eating carpet, I would’ve never believed it,” he added, referring to the photo of Allen on the ground after police officers finally subdued him.
That detail — his faith — flies in the face of how President Trump has characterized the attack.
“When you read his manifesto, he hates Christians,” Trump told Fox News. “He hates Christians, a hatred.”
A blizzard of unnamed “administration officials” echoed this Trump claim in major media outlets.
But that’s not what the manifesto says. And if anything, it appears that Trump’s portrayal of himself as Jesus Christ (you know, the AI-generated image of a robed Trump healing the sick) might have provoked Allen. Also, an alleged copy of his manifesto reported by the New York Post shows Allen invoking Christian theology to defend the shooting, working through Gospel passages one by one like someone who had spent real time with the Bible.
In a section of the manifesto titled “Rebuttals to objections,” the first rebuttal addresses the Gospel injunction to turn the other cheek — a teaching from the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5:38-39, where Jesus instructs his followers not to retaliate against personal wrongs done to them. Allen reframes it as inapplicable when others are the ones suffering:
Objection 1: As a Christian, you should turn the other cheek.
Rebuttal: Turning the other cheek is for when you yourself are oppressed. I’m not the person raped in a detention camp. I’m not the fisherman executed without trial. I’m not a schoolkid blown up or a child starved or a teenage girl abused by the many criminals in this administration.
Turning the other cheek when *someone else* is oppressed is not Christian behavior; it is complicity in the oppressor’s crimes.
Then he addresses “Render unto Caesar” — a phrase from the synoptic Gospels (Matthew 22:21, Mark 12:17, Luke 20:25) in which Jesus, when asked whether Jews should pay taxes to Rome, replies that one should give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s. The passage has been cited for centuries to argue for deference to political authority. Allen disputes that framing on constitutional grounds:
Objection 5: Yield unto Caesar what is Caesar’s.
Rebuttal: The United States of America are ruled by the law, not by any one or several people. In so far as representatives and judges do not follow the law, no one is required to yield them anything so unlawfully ordered.
A third reference to religion appears in a brief thank you to his church:
“Thank you to my family, both personal and church, for your love over these 31 years.”
Allen’s reported Bluesky social media account also contains repeated reference to Christianity, including one from earlier this month in which he identifies “as a Protestant,” and repeated comparisons of Trump to the Antichrist.
On April 13, in response to the Trump-as-Jesus image, Allen replied quoting a verse from Revelations about the antichrist that now reads like a foreshadowing:
“There will be no rest day or night for those who worship the beast and its image, or for anyone who receives the mark of its name.”
Perhaps the sharpest irony comes from a story former classmates shared with me.
Allen was once president of Caltech's Nerf club — a role he apparently took seriously enough to butt heads with the club's own culture. He pushed back against what he saw as the militarization of the toy guns — members modifying them to be more powerful and painting them to look more like real weapons — worked closely with campus security, and by former classmates' accounts, de-escalated conflicts with a deftness that genuinely impressed people.
In other words, the same person who once fought to keep Nerf guns from looking too much like real weapons allegedly drove cross-country with a sawed-off shotgun and handguns (per NBC), intending to kill the President.
“This is a shock,” someone else who knew him said. “He seems extremely smart from the small conversations I’ve had with him.”
So what happened?
From Luigi Mangione to Cole Allen, these shooters aren’t the antisocial loners of media imagination. They’re smart, well-liked, often idealistic. They have no prior criminal record. They take pains to avoid bystander casualties, as Allen reportedly did. But they share one conviction: that the political system has failed completely, and someone has to act.
“I don’t see anyone else picking up the slack,” Allen’s manifesto reads.
Trump’s comments on Allen’s hatred of Christianity, however inaccurate, echoes the language of his national security directive NSPM-7, which labels “anti-Christianity” as an indicator of domestic terrorism. That view will triumph, regardless of the facts, and the FBI and the intelligence agencies will be tasked to find out more about the supposed anti-Christian threat. The law enforcement agencies will request more money for security screening and for surveillance and they will get it.
The only question is if anyone will ask why increasingly normal people feel the political system is so unresponsive to their concerns that they resort to violence.
— Edited by William M. Arkin
as usual, ahead of the pack. this is terrific reporting, Ken.
Great reporting as always, but I also always appreciate the level-headed analysis of the facts laid out in front of us. It's important that these incidents aren't viewed as simply the actions of crazed, perhaps "mentally unwell", individuals, but as the actions of people who have been pushed to the brink by a system that's failing people at best and actively murdering them at worst.