Hilton Shooter’s Last Full-Time Job Was Building Drones For The Pentagon
The new FBI affidavit and "manifesto" reveal the shooter had no chance of reaching Trump which begs the question who would fund an assassination attempt designed to fail, and why?
When I say the Hilton Hotel shooting looks staged, I mean a false flag—an event manufactured for a political outcome. That doesn’t require the shooter’s involvement in the planning, or even for him to know who set it up.
What we do know: the suspect wasn’t full-time employed. His last known job? A defense contractor making military drones. Cole Tomas Allen appeared in federal court in Washington on Monday, charged with attempting to assassinate the President, transporting a firearm and ammo across state lines, and discharging a weapon during a violent crime. The FBI affidavit and Allen’s full manifesto dropped the same day.
Allen graduated Caltech in 2017 with a mechanical engineering degree. A year at IJK Controls building gimbal systems—tech the US military uses to track targets from the air. In 2020, IJK was scooped up by General Atomics, the Predator and Reaper drone company, owned by Republican mega-donor Linden Blue. In January 2026, Blue lobbied for fewer export bottlenecks on drones. Trump slashed the red tape weeks later.
Trump publicly announced he’d attend the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on March 2. Five days later, Allen booked his Hilton room for three nights, under his own name. Seven weeks of premeditation, logged in the system.
On April 21, Allen boarded an Amtrak train in Los Angeles, embarking on a four-day train ride that’s within typical expenditure for someone like Allen.
He checked into the Hilton with two firearms — both legally bought, both registered to his name. The FBI affidavit cites Amtrak’s travel records as evidence. It does not list a firearms-declaration form. Either Allen traveled four days unscreened, or the federal government left the paperwork out.
Allen flagged the security vacuum himself. In his manifesto: “I expected security cameras at every bend, bugged hotel rooms, armed agents every 10 feet… What I got (who knows, maybe they’re pranking me!) is nothing.” This is a guy who built drone surveillance for the military. He knew what real surveillance looked like—and saw none of it. He wondered, in writing, who ‘they’ might be. He left it unanswered.
The dinner was in the International Ballroom—deep underground, multiple service entrances. The main lobby and elevators stayed open. Reporters called the place wide open. Allen, up on the tenth floor, took the staff stairwell down with his guns in a black bag. But instead of any number of unscreened paths, he walked straight to the magnetometer line—the only screened entrance—and charged, openly, long gun in hand. That’s not an engineer’s plan.
What makes his decision to access via the magnetometer even weirder is that he didn’t need to. According to Aaron Parnas, a Hilton guest reported that the key card system was disabled the evening of the dinner and the hours leading up to it. Anyone could ride to any floor unscreened. Parnas tested the next day — system restored.
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