MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
Cole Allen will remain in jail for the time being. Allen is the man charged with trying to assassinate President Trump on Saturday at the White House Correspondents' Dinner. NPR Justice correspondent Ryan Lucas was in the courtroom today when the 31-year-old from California agreed to remain in custody. There are still so many questions about what happened Saturday night after Allen rushed through a Secret Service checkpoint. I took them one by one with Ryan, who's been covering the legal proceedings. We spoke on NPR's weekly national security podcast Sources & Methods.
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KELLY: Ryan, what happened? What new did we learn?
RYAN LUCAS, BYLINE: So this was a - supposed to be a detention hearing for the man accused of trying to assassinate President Trump, Cole Allen. It ended up being a bit of a nothing burger in the sense that he conceded detention. He actually is not challenging the government's request to have him held pending trial. That...
KELLY: Not trying to get out on bail.
LUCAS: Not trying to get out on bail. He did reserve the right to challenge it down the road. But we were expecting to get maybe some new information out of prosecutors today about what investigators have learned, but we did not. But we have learned in the past couple days a bit more from court filings from both the government and most recently from Allen's defense lawyers, about him and his alleged planning to conduct the attack on Saturday.
KELLY: Start with him. What do we actually know about Cole Allen?
LUCAS: Well, he is from Torrance, California. He's 31-years-old. He graduated from Caltech in 2017, very prestigious school in California, with a degree in mechanical engineering. He also has a master's degree in computer science from another state school. He had been working as a tutor teaching kids, basically preparing them for college entrance exams. And we had actually - NPR had spoken with one of the students of his, who basically described Allen as quirky. That was basically his word for it.
Now, in filings that we got from the defense attorneys, interestingly, they described him as a devout Christian who spent countless hours with church groups for as long as family and friends can remember. They said that he dutifully attends his Christian church, that he's an active participant in his community. And so the kind of bottom-line view that we get of him is someone who is from kind of a middle-class family, very well educated, intelligent and a devout Christian.
KELLY: And you're reminding me of an interview that we did on NPR earlier this week - this was on Morning Edition - where we heard from someone who was in the same Christian fellowship group back in college as Cole Allen. This is a woman named Eliza Terlinden.
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ELIZA TERLINDEN: He saw this most likely as his duty as a Christian and as an American. Any rhetoric that he was being anti-Christian is simply inaccurate. And I'm sad that he took this step, but I believe in his mind, he felt that he didn't have another choice.
KELLY: I can hear her voice breaking there. How do we square this - he saw this as his duty as a Christian - with what we all saw, you know, unfolding in real time over the weekend? I mean, what are we learning about the why - the why Cole Allen seems to have thought this was a good idea?
LUCAS: I mean, motive is obviously the question that hangs over any incident like this, and it's often one of the hardest to get an answer to. It's certainly one that the government has not offered a full-throated answer to at this point. The closest explanation that we've gotten so far is from the - a letter that he allegedly sent to family members and a few other people right before this alleged attack took place in which he talks about his distaste for - and he doesn't name the individual, but he describes someone as a rapist, a pedophile. And it's clear that he's referencing President Trump and that he says essentially that he is targeting administration officials from the highest to the lowest.
Now, as for the why, he says that he's an American citizen, that what his representatives do reflects on him. And there's also a line in the email that he allegedly sent that is particularly - that grabbed me. And in it, he says - he's talking about turning a cheek, turning your cheek as a Christian. And he says, you do that when you're oppressed. But he says, in this instance, he is not the one who is oppressed. And then he says, quote, "I am not the person raped in a detention camp. I am not a fisherman executed without trial, not a schoolchild blown up or a child starved or teenage girl abused by many criminals in this administration." So I think from that, it's clear that there are certain things that he associates with this administration that were upsetting to him.
KELLY: I said there's still so many questions. What's the biggest question on your mind? You said you were hoping to get more answers at the hearing this morning. What do you want to know?
LUCAS: There are questions about who fired what and when. There's a bit - the government says at this point that Cole Allen fired a shotgun when he was trying to storm into the ballroom, but they also say that the ballistics report is not fully done on that yet, so we don't have final word on that. That is one question. It doesn't change our full understanding of what may have transpired on Saturday night, but it certainly is a detail that is important because it might have bearing on the charges that he faces.
KELLY: Absolutely.
LUCAS: But I think also the question of what drove this young man to allegedly go from his home in California, take a train all the way across the country to try to take this violent act, targeting the highest officials in the land - what ultimately drove him to do that, take that dramatic step is something I would like an answer to.
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KELLY: That was NPR Justice correspondent Ryan Lucas. We were speaking on NPR's national security podcast Sources & Methods. You can hear our full conversation where we talk about this third assassination attempt on President Trump, the second indictment of former FBI Director James Comey and the latest on the U.S. war with Iran. You can listen wherever you get your podcasts. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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