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Chapter 1: What happened during the shooting at the White House Correspondents' Dinner?
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanch offered a bit of a reality check about the shooting at the White House Correspondents' Dinner. The president, he said, was not really in danger. This man was a floor above the ballroom with hundreds of federal agents. between him and the president of the United States. The worst never came to pass. Law enforcement did not fail.
They did exactly what they are trained to do. Solid attorney generaling.
Chapter 2: How did law enforcement respond to the shooting incident?
Then late yesterday, Blanche filed a request asking a federal judge to overturn a previous ruling and allow President Trump to build a ballroom. Wait, what? How did this get to be about the ballroom? Today on Today Explained from Vox, fallout from this weekend's attempted assassination. The good, the bad, the weird, the conspiracies, all of it up ahead. It's drone proof. It's bulletproof glass.
We need the ballroom. If you need more evidence of why this feels staged, everyone is talking about the ballroom. Support for Today Explained comes from CNN. Cool. Cable News Network, what's up? Do you want to live forever? What? Yes? Maybe? I haven't thought about it that much.
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New episodes streaming Sundays with the CNN subscription. Go to CNN.com slash subscribe to start watching. Once upon a mundane morning, Barb's day got busy without warning. A realtor in need of an open house sign. No, 50 of them. And designed before nine. My head hurts. Any mighty tools to help with this plight? Ow! Aha! Barb made her move. She opened Canva and got in the groove.
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This is Today Explained. Molly Olmstead is a staff writer at Slate. She writes about the right.
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Chapter 3: What conspiracy theories emerged after the shooting?
OK, so this weekend, White House Correspondents Dinner is underway. Shooter enters the Hilton, doesn't make it past security. No one is killed. Shooter's apprehended. The Internet reacts. And what's the reaction? It was instantaneously, I would say. skeptical in a way that was actually kind of remarkable.
I mean, I know that I was fielding text messages from people asking me if it was staged within minutes of it happening. You know, if you look, it was happening on the parts of the Internet, the parts of social media that are dominated by liberal voices. A lot of people are not buying that this assassination attempt was legit. I mean, Trump is known to stage things for his benefit
I don't believe in that whole White House correspondent shooting event going on. Don't believe in it. I think it's all staged. They didn't even wait for evidence, really. It just was kind of an almost gut reaction that people had based on the idea that there was an attack.
against the president and that there had been several of them before it's not entirely unexpected but it does make you wonder about the people who say it was staged okay gotcha why why do they think it was staged Well, there is what they'll tell you, which is that, you know, Trump's facial expression doesn't look like it reflects real fear. Trump clearly smirks when shots are fired.
No panic, no fear. He knew it was coming. Or that there was something odd to how Caroline Leavitt was saying there were going to be shots fired tonight, which she meant in a purely rhetorical way. There will be some shots fired tonight in the room. Then there were people who sort of couldn't believe that a gunman would be able to get into the hotel. All right, I'll be that guy.
Where did the agents shoot him? What stopped him? Where's the blood? Why is his supratrochlear vein not indicating that he is in any pain or distress? Is this another staged event? All of these things sort of reflect, I think, a lack of understanding maybe about how security operations work or about how just humans react to times of crises and just sort of the randomness of life.
Why would President Trump stage this? What are people saying to that question? The dominant answer was that President Trump was using this to get support for his White House ballroom. There were two real reasons for this. One was that the president himself, you know, made the argument afterwards that this showed why they needed a secure ballroom. It's not a safe ballroom.
I'm building a safe ballroom. And the second reason was that a bunch of MAGA influencers all said essentially the same thing. After last night, I think it's safe to say that building the ballroom at the White House is an absolute must. Build the ballroom. Would be real nice if the White House had its own ballroom, huh? It's actually not remarkable.
It's how the system, MAGA influencer system works. But to anyone who is less familiar with it, it seems really suspicious. So that's why Trump wanting the ballroom and staging his own assassination attempt to get the ballroom became the dominant narrative.
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Chapter 4: Why do some people believe the shooting was staged?
ultimately harmful for our democracy we would not be working off of a shared reality in any way that lets us get to any sort of practical solutions for any of the myriad problems our country faces we can't work in a system in which we all just treat each other as the most fantastical, extreme version of ourselves. So, trust Donald Trump? Absolutely not.
But jump to think that there's some sort of convoluted, strange thing going on? That's not healthy either. Molly Olmsted is a staff writer at Slate. When we return, Todd Blanch, the acting attorney general, acts. Support for the show today comes from Quince. Spring cleaning, it takes many forms. I might do some this weekend. Deep cleaning the kitchen, done it already.
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Chapter 5: What evidence do conspiracy theorists cite to support their claims?
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This is Today Explained.
Paula Reid is the chief legal affairs correspondent for CNN. She was at the White House Correspondents' Dinner and was also watching the aftermath, in part to see how the acting head of the DOJ would conduct himself. It was interesting when the president addressed the nation late Saturday. He was flanked by his top two Justice Department officials, Todd Blanch and Kash Patel.
Todd is the acting attorney general, and he came out and did what you would expect the nation's top law enforcement official to do, Tell us what they know about what's going on. There will be multiple charges around the shooting, around the possession of firearms, and anything else that we can get on this guy. Detail exactly what steps they were taking and what we can expect next.
Justice will be served. Todd Blanche has actually, I think, really met the moment perfectly, especially in the larger context of my reporting on his audition for attorney general.
Because what happened Saturday night, this is the first thing that has sort of happened to the Blanche Justice Department, as opposed to being, you know, something they've done, or what we've seen throughout the Trump Justice Department, which has been a lot of self-inflicted controversies. The handling of the Epstein files.
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Chapter 6: How did Trump's previous actions influence perceptions of the shooting?
In a post on Truth Social, Trump said he had been indicted, quote, over what he called the boxes hoax. That is a reference to the boxes found at his Mar-a-Lago estate by the FBI last August, which contained classified materials. He also represented him in New York on the Hushmoney case. But what really distinguished Todd Blanche is that Trump lawyers come and go.
I mean, I've probably talked to like 40 of them over the past decade, right? They come, they go, they have trouble with the client, they have trouble with some of the people behind the scenes, the spotlight, the cases. Todd flourished. Yes, his client was convicted in New York, but he kept him out of jail.
And ultimately, their legal strategy on the federal cases resulted in Trump never facing trial on either one of those in Trump's eyes. Todd Blanche is the guy who kept him out of jail. What has he been up to since he ended up in the acting role? He's been a busy bee. In my reporting, I talked to over a dozen people inside DOJ, high-level people.
Some people I know don't particularly care for Todd as a person. They're rivals, whatever. There was a general consensus, though. This is his job to lose. But in order to keep this, he's going to have to deliver on weaponization for the president. And that means Trump wants his political adversaries to be prosecuted. And that is something that they have not been able to do yet.
Judges and grand juries have to sign off on this. They've largely been reluctant. A U.S. District Judge ruled the appointment of Attorney Lindsey Halligan is unlawful. We have learned that the Justice Department's case against former FBI Director Jim Comey and the New York Attorney General have both been dismissed. And so they're getting tripped up by the checks in the system.
It's nearly impossible. In some cases, the things that Trump has wanted, but he's made it clear this is what he wants. So that's ultimately, in order to get this job and to keep it, he needs to bring a case against a political adversary. All right. So we know that President Trump likes Todd Blanch.
We know that MAGA has been disappointed by the job that the Justice Department has done investigating the Epstein files. How many of you are satisfied? You can you can clap. Satisfied with the results of the Epstein investigation. Clap. I think it's a huge miscalculation. And I truly just stand with the women. And I think they deserve to be the ones that we're fighting for.
When will we see justice? Does MAGA, which was very unfriendly at the end toward Pam Bondi, does MAGA like Todd Blanche? So the two knocks on Todd Blanch are that, quote, he's not MAGA enough, and that he doesn't get the Trump DOJ away from the, quote, original sin of how they've handled the Epstein files. Let's start with, are you MAGA enough?
So I have talked to officials inside the administration, including this one White House official who said, yeah, we feel that Todd is not MAGA enough. He doesn't do enough for the base. But even those people who in past stories have been pretty tough on Todd said when it comes to being the acting attorney general, he's done the job. It's about as good as we're going to get.
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Chapter 7: What role does social media play in spreading conspiracy theories?
It was funny, on the night of the dinner and the shooting, Todd was at the White House. He did the press conference to the president, said there will be charges. There'll be a gun charge, maybe a law enforcement-related charge. 30, 45 minutes later, I don't remember how much time passed, but the U.S. attorney...
She did a press conference, and man, she was yelling the specific statutes into that microphone. Right now, the defendant is being charged with two counts, 924C, using a firearm during a crime of violence, and a second crime under 111, which is assault on a federal officer using a dangerous weapon. It felt a little like one-upsmanship.
Maybe it was just her enthusiasm, and I'm reading something into it. But her name has certainly been mentioned. We got two and a half more years. I mean, there's probably time for everyone to be attorney general if Todd can't or won't stay in the job for two and a half years. It's a tough job under any administration, but this one really brings some unique challenges.
Paula Reid is CNN's chief legal correspondent. Danielle Hewitt and Kelly Wessinger produced today's show and Jolie Myers edited. David Tatasciore is our engineer and Gabriel Duntov checked the facts. I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explained. Once upon a mundane morning, Barb's day got busy without warning. A realtor in need of an open house sign. No, 50 of them! And designed before 9.
My head hurts. Any mighty tools to help with this plight? Ah-ha! Barb made her move. She opened Canva and got in the groove. While creating Canva sheets, create 50 signs fit for suburban streets. Done in a click, all complete.
Sweet! Now, imagine what your dreams can become when you put imagination to work at Canva.com.
Support for this show comes from Harvey AI. The future of law is agentic, not just tools that assist, but AI agents that navigate complex matters. That's why Harvey created agents that can do the work from end to end. They build a plan, pull from secure data sources, run sub-agents in parallel, and draft the work product ready for your review. So you delegate the work and own the judgment.
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