Former President Barack Obama completely ignored the alleged White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner gunman’s manifesto and failed to mention that President Donald Trump was his top target, claiming that “we don’t yet have the details about the motives” behind the Saturday night shooting in Washington, DC.
Obama was heavily criticized for his Sunday evening social media post, in which he called on Americans to “reject” political violence while failing to mention that shooting suspect Cole Tomas Allen is an outspoken leftist who allegedly wrote about targeting Trump administration officials before attempting to rush into the dinner with a shotgun, a handgun, and several knives.
“Although we don’t yet have the details about the motives behind last night’s shooting at the White House Correspondents Dinner, it’s incumbent upon all us to reject the idea that violence has any place in our democracy,” the Democrat former president wrote. “It’s also a sobering reminder of the courage and sacrifice that U.S. Secret Service Agents show every day. I’m grateful to them — and thankful that the agent who was shot is going to be okay.”
The post was made shortly after 5:00 p.m., nearly six hours after Allen’s alleged manifesto listing out his far-left motives for carrying out a shooting was published by the New York Post.
The 1,052-word document obtained by the outlet on Sunday morning was signed “Cole ‘coldForce’ ‘Friendly Federal Assassin’ Allen,” and claimed he was going to aim for Trump and his officials, “prioritized from highest-ranking to lowest.” Allen notably excluded FBI Director Kash Patel from his list of targets.
“I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes,” he allegedly wrote.
Allen was also an attendee of a leftist anti-Trump No Kings protest, and had “a ton of anti-Trump and anti-Christian rhetoric on his social media accounts,” Fox News’s Jacqui Heinrich first reported.
Several Trump administration officials and Republican lawmakers balked at Obama’s post, with Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Lee Zeldin writing, “Let’s not pretend to be this clueless about motive.”
“The attempted assassin put out an anti-Trump manifesto about wanting to kill Trump Admin officials, minutes before trying to storm a ballroom filled with the President, VP, Cabinet, and many others from his Admin,” he added.
Former FBI Assistant Director Dan Bongino wrote, “Are you kidding?”
“It was politically motivated. He made that pretty clear,” Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) argued in one post:
In another post, Lee wrote, “We ‘don’t know’ the shooter’s motive [i]n the same sense that we ‘don’t know’ who killed OJ Simpson’s wife.”
“There is no ambiguity. It was a politically motivated attack driven by anti-Trump and anti-Christian bile. It’s wrong to downplay or obscure the obvious motive,” former Department of Homeland Security (DHS) spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin argued:
Olivia Rondeau is a politics reporter for Breitbart News based in Washington, DC. Find her on X/Twitter and Instagram.