It was dinner time at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday, and C-SPAN had switched to a split screen: On the right side, there was Oz Pearlman, the mentalist, performing one of his feats for President Trump, the first lady and Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt. On the left, there was an in-studio conversation with Michael Dubke, the former White House Communications Director.
Then, at 8:34:45, there was commotion, as Trump, the first lady and others were evacuated. Twelve seconds later, host Peter Slen cut into the Dubke interview to say, “Yep. Yep. I see it. Just a second, we have an issue here at the head table.” A C-SPAN camera went into a wide shot of the room.
For years, C-SPAN has offered the most comprehensive coverage of the dinner and, on Saturday, it once again was the sole operator of pool cameras in the ballroom, offering the feed that generated the first images of the commotion, confusion and chaos that took place that night.
A suspect, Cole Allen, was charged Monday with attempting to assassinate the president after he ran through a security checkpoint, armed with a rifle. Shots were fired in the lobby, followed by a swarm of Secret Service agents scrambling to get the president and other administration officials out of the ballroom, as attendees dropped to the floor, hid under tables and crouched down behind chairs.
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The network’s four cameras were stationed around the ballroom, but much closer to the shooting was the temporary C-SPAN technical operations center. It was located just outside the entrance doors at the rear of the ballroom, under one of the flights of stairs. One level up the steps, about 35 feet away, was where the incident happened.
“The first thing I heard was the sound of a shotgun. It sounded like a cannon going off. Then there was the report of four or five shots. We both said, ‘gunfire’,” said Bob Reilly, C-SPAN field crew chief and production manager, who was with Randy Rohrbaugh, a field technician who was directing on site. Also with them was audio operator Christina Taylor.
“Gunshots! Gunshots! Camera operators get down,” Rohrbaugh said he shouted into his headset at his crew inside the ballroom.
Secret Service agents rushed down the stairwell, to the C-SPAN operations center and the ballroom entrance, their guns drawn at the ballroom doors, as others swarmed in.
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“We could hear a scuffling going on — ‘Get down! Get down! Get down!’ Then a lot of banter between agents,” Reilly said. He and Rorhbaugh each heard the agents using code words as they communicated.
He recalled hearing one of the agents yelling up the stairs, ‘Do I have a closer path?’ They wanted to get protected individuals out.”
Hotel and catering staff came to the C-SPAN control area to get shelter.
At this point, “no one knew where this was taking place. They sheltered beneath the stairs behind us,” Reilly said. As they started filing in to their area, some looked upset and some were crying.
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In those first minutes, there was concern over the safety of the camera operators — Mo Aljasheme, Alex Curtis, Diane Frola and Jack Spiegel. Some, like Aljasheme, were in a raised portion of the room and were especially exposed, but he continued to capture the shot of the dais as the Trumps were rushed off stage.
“We weren’t sure if there was a shooter in the ballroom,” Rohrbaugh said, and he got on his headset and asked the operators to check back in to make sure they were OK. “I said, ‘Let me know you are OK by talking to me or by shaking the camera.’” They did.
“They just rose to the occasion,” Reilly said.
From what Reilly overhear from Secret Service agents, they had subdued the suspect.
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A few minutes later, as attendees began rising from the floor, C-SPAN started mixing shots from the various cameras, showing attendees, some wandering, some recording video and journalists mobilizing.
“We kept feeding back our cameras and kept punching to make sure we could tell as much of story as we could,” Reilly said.
Inside the cavernous, below-ground space of the ballroom, though, attendees still had very few details of what had transpired.
Like many other media organizations, C-SPAN also had tables for staff and their guests, with CEO Sam Feist and host Greta Brawner among those sitting near the dais.
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Brawner said that she was talking to guests when she heard what sounded like the crash of a tray. She then heard, “Get down! Get down!”
She crouched down near a chair and then started to look around, including up at the dais.
By that point, Trump, the first lady and others were gone, and a SWAT team was on the stage with their guns out. She said she turned to the back of the room and saw Secret Service agents leapfrogging over chairs as they sought to retrieve other administration principals.
“Then I saw John Fetterman [the Pennsylvania senator] standing straight up. He was standing up and not sitting down and not sitting under a table or anything,” Brawner said.
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Minutes after the shots were heard, armed agents were on the dais.
C-SPAN
At that point it still felt like the threat “was still in the room,” she said. Two tables away was Kelly Loeffler, the administer of the Small Business Administration. She also spotted security escorting away Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr., with his wife Cheryl Hines at a breakneck pace to follow him to the stage and off to a side room. Then she saw Secretary of State Marco Rubio being escorted away as well.
“The entire time, the room is silent,” Brawner said. “There are 2,700 people there.” Some were crying, and “the only thing you hear is law enforcement yelling and the crashing of glass.”
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Eventually, “people started to get up and gather themselves.” Brawner said she texted family members to inform them that she was OK, while the C-SPAN studio was calling her, as well as other hosts and employees to get them on the air. The first to connect was Malaika Hall, an associate producer.
But cell service was hit or miss. Every time Brawner picked up, her phone hung up. She needed to get better cell coverage and searched for an exit — no easy task with some doors blocked. Eventually, hotel staff directed her to an exit through a kitchen area and she went on a side street, where she got better service and was able to get on air.
For about 30 minutes, Brawner recounted the night’s events, before the decision was made to head back to the studio, located near Union Station and the Capitol. That, too, was not easy, given the lack of taxi and Uber access with so many streets blocked. Brawner made her way to the other side of the hotel, along Connecticut Avenue, and on a side street spotted a potential solution: someone on an e-bike.
“Hey, can I get a ride?” she asked.
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He told her to get on. In her gown, she sat side saddle on the bike as he began to find his away around cordoned off security barriers. “As he takes off, I think, ‘This is a really stupid idea.’” As it turned out, the bicyclist was a press photographer, racing to the White House to get to Trump’s press briefing in time, a stop that wouldn’t get her much closer to the studio.
She got off the bike on a side street, and it was there that she ran into Michele Remillard, C-SPAN’s executive producer of Ceasefire. She was heading to her car and back to the studio, where she continued to recount her experiences.
Brawner had been on air on January 6, 2021, and said that there were some similarities, including not to “overdramatize the situation and don’t underreport as well.” Another thing she kept in mind: Don’t speculate, as there were, at that point, “more questions than answers.”
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C-SPAN, with its tagline “Democracy Unfiltered,” typically covers committee hearings and presidential events, which is why Saturday night was so unexpected. Yet its team quickly mobilized, in what Feist calls “a night that none of us will ever forget.”
“It was a traumatic experience for all the imaginable reasons, but our crew who was working and our hosts who raced out to bear witness to what they have been part of, I can’t say enough positive things about,” Feist said. “I can’t say enough positive things about how impressed I was that they kept doing their jobs. And that’s why the world can see what happened in that room.”
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