BREAKING: Calls Grow to Fire Susie Wiles After Shooting at Trump Dinner
White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles is facing a wave of internal criticism following Saturday night’s shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, where a gunman exchanged fire with Secret Service agents just feet from the president and several senior cabinet members.
Wiles was not present at the Washington Hilton event, but her oversight of the Secret Service has put her squarely in the crosshairs of those inside the administration looking to assign blame.
A former administration official told RealClear Politics that Wiles bears responsibility for allowing Secret Service Director Sean Curran to keep his job despite what the source described as a string of security failures. “Susie oversees the Secret Service, and it’s failure after failure after failure, and she gets no blame,” the source said.
The criticism comes as reports circulate that Trump is weighing whether to remove FBI Director Kash Patel, a move that has struck some insiders as misplaced. “They’re about to fire Kash, and he had nothing to do with this,” the same source noted. Others have pushed back on blaming Wiles entirely, pointing out that Trump’s own sons reportedly lobbied for Curran’s appointment when the administration took office.
Curran was on Trump’s security detail during the July 2024 Butler, Pennsylvania rally shooting, when a gunman killed one attendee and grazed the president’s ear. He has maintained that the agency has since taken significant steps to prevent a repeat, but Saturday’s events have renewed questions about whether those changes were enough.
Eyewitness accounts from inside the Hilton paint a picture of glaring vulnerabilities. The Daily Beast’s executive editor, who was present, noted that access to the event required little more than flashing a ticket, with no meaningful checkpoint between hotel rooms and the ballroom. The gunman, identified as 31-year-old Cole Tomas Allen, was armed with a shotgun, handgun, and multiple knives, and is facing federal charges for using a firearm during a crime of violence and assaulting a federal officer.
Rather than address the security breakdown directly, Trump took to Truth Social the following morning to promote his $400 million White House ballroom construction project, claiming the attack would never have occurred had the new facility already been completed.
