Kari Lake said the security at Saturday's White House Correspondents' Dinner was so bad her table was already talking about it before the shots fired.
Lawrence Jones was in that same room – and he went on Fox News Sunday morning to say what nobody in charge wants to hear.
What the Fox & Friends co-host said about Secret Service leadership has the people who run these events on notice.
Secret Service Security Failure at White House Correspondents Dinner Was Months in the Making
Senate Democrats triggered a DHS funding shutdown in February – blocking bill after bill, rejecting five separate GOP proposals to reopen the department, all over disputes about immigration enforcement.
The result: more than 100,000 DHS employees, including Secret Service agents, have been working without regular pay for over 60 days.
Last week – days before a gunman named Cole Tomas Allen boarded a train in Los Angeles and rode it to Washington, D.C. carrying a small arsenal.
Secret Service Director Sean Curran sat before Congress and warned lawmakers the agency is not adequately staffed to handle current demands, let alone the FIFA World Cup, the 2028 Olympics, or the next presidential cycle.
Nobody acted.
Allen, 31, of Torrance, California, sent his family a manifesto roughly ten minutes before he rushed the magnetometer checkpoint Saturday night at 8:40 p.m.
In the manifesto, administration officials were his targets – "prioritized from highest-ranking to lowest."
He also admitted expecting tighter security at the hotel – and was caught off guard by what he actually found.
He had no reason to be.
Former White House principal deputy press secretary Harrison Fields told Fox & Friends there were "no checkpoints to get into the hotel" and that Allen had been a registered hotel guest – free to move through public spaces, observe the crowd, and position himself before anyone stopped him.
"There was a VIP reception right off the main ballroom where Cabinet secretaries were, where the president could have been – and there was no security apparatus leading up to that point," Fields said.
Lake, a Trump ally who attended the dinner, posted on X: "I was there. Security was terrible at the event. It was the easiest event I've ever gained access to that the president was at. It was so bad we talked about it at our table before the shots rang out."
Lawrence Jones Called the WHCD Shooting a Leadership Failure on Live Television
Jones didn't mince words on Fox News.
"This is a failure of leadership," he said. "The same thing continues to happen over and over again."
He said it as someone who respects the men and women doing the job – agents he calls friends, people he watched rush toward gunfire without hesitation Saturday night.
"In the moment, the reaction is always a lion's heart," Jones said. "You see them rushing toward danger."
That courage is not the problem.
Jones connected it directly to Butler – July 13, 2024, when a 20-year-old climbed a rooftop 200 yards from Trump, fired eight rounds, and killed Corey Comperatore while Secret Service had a warning sitting in front of them for 25 minutes.
Senator Rand Paul's final report on that day called it "not just a tragedy – it was a scandal."
Nobody was fired.
Jones said what too many in Washington are afraid to say out loud: "the principal is safe" is not a good enough standard when the Speaker of the House is in the same room as the president and a gunman with a shotgun found the hallway.
"We lost an American, Corey, as a result of a casualty of them just worried about the principal," Jones said. "We have to do better."
“So, this was a failure. We would do ourselves some good by saying, ‘We appreciate the men and women that risk their lives every single day, but we have to do better.’ The teacher of the month was able to run through a barrage of men and woman through magnetometers!” Jones added.
The same patterns that failed in Butler showed up again Saturday night in Washington, D.C.
The agents who tackled Cole Allen Saturday night are heroes.
Democrat politicians who left them unpaid while the threat level climbed are not.
Butler had a Senate report, disciplinary action against six unnamed agents, and zero firings.
If Saturday night follows the same pattern, the next time a gunman finds a hallway he won't be surprised by what he finds – he'll be counting on it.
Sources:
- Amanda Hatch, "Secret Service in Line of Fire at WHCA Shooting Still Unpaid Due to Dem-Led Shutdown," Fox News, April 26, 2026.
- "Suspect in White House Correspondents' Dinner Shooting Wrote of Targeting Trump Administration," NBC News, April 26, 2026.
- Isaac Schorr, "'This Was a Failure': Fox's Lawrence Jones Torches Secret Service Over Shooting," Mediaite, April 26, 2026.
- "Security Under Scrutiny as WHCD Attendees Cite Inconsistent Screening Before Shooting," Fox News, April 26, 2026.
- "Appropriations, Homeland Security Republicans Slam Democrats' DHS Shutdown for Risking Safety and Security of Americans," House Committee on Appropriations, February 19, 2026.
- Chairman Rand Paul, "Final Report Detailing Secret Service Failures in Attempted Assassination of President Donald J. Trump," Senate HSGAC, July 14, 2025.