Inside the White House Correspondents’ Dinner when shots rang out: Here’s what CBS News journalists saw and heard.

When a gunman charged a security checkpoint outside the hotel ballroom where the White House Correspondents’ Dinner was taking place Saturday night, reporters in the room quickly reacted, sharing what they knew with the public.

Some heard gunfire. Some only heard a loud noise and the response from security officials. They didn’t immediately know the suspect had been tackled and detained. They didn’t know if a threat was ongoing or not. 

Here are some of the first-hand accounts from CBS News journalists at the dinner:

Weijia Jiang

As the president of the White House Correspondents Association, senior White House correspondent Weijia Jiang had a unique position Saturday night. She was sitting next to President Trump at a long table on the dais.

Just before the incident, Jiang said she and Mr. Trump watched mentalist Oz Perelman do a trick on White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, claiming he could guess the name of her unborn baby. 

“At that very moment, we heard commotion. I looked out in the audience and thought there might have been a heckler. But I didn’t see one,” Jiang recounted.

“Before I could make sense of what was unfolding, armed agents rushed toward the dais. They multiplied quickly, sprinting from the other side of the stage to surround us. I heard shouts of ‘down, down, down, get down,'” Jiang wrote. “I got out of my chair and was following Trump when he hit the ground. I got on my hands and knees too. Only later did I see a big bruise on my left knee. I was crawling, and we were ushered behind the stage.”

Read Jiang’s full recounting of her experience here.

Nancy Cordes

Chief White House correspondent Nancy Cordes said the room had just started eating the dinner. Salad courses were on the table. 

“Suddenly these Secret Service agents started running down the middle of the ballroom here and yelling at everyone to get under our tables, so we did that,” she said in a video shared on social media. “Members of the president’s Cabinet, top officials from the White House were yanked out of the room a few minutes later. We stayed under our tables until we were told it was safe to get out.”

At the time, she and others around her didn’t know what happened. 

“At this point, no one really knows whether it’s safe to leave, whether the dinner is going to continue. We’re one floor below ground level here, no windows, so it’s really not possible to see outside and to know exactly what’s going on right now,” she said.

Ed O’Keefe

Senior White House and political correspondent Ed O’Keefe said he heard a loud noise in the back of the room that prompted a “huge rush of security officials to come through and take virtually every senior government official out of here.”

He observed that many of the political officials in the room quickly got down to the floor. 

“You can tell they’ve been trained or told what to do when something like this happens,” he said in a video on social media. 

O’Keefe said he was sitting near House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, who survived a shooting at a congressional baseball team practice in Virginia in 2017.  

“The moment it happened, he hit the floor,” O’Keefe said. Scalise’s security came right away.

“His security agent said, ‘I’ve got Tiger,’ and took him out,” O’Keefe said.

Major Garrett

Chief Washington correspondent Major Garrett was sitting at a table close to the dais. He was talking with White House deputy chief of staff for policy Steven Miller, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and their wives when the commotion started. 

Garrett said he didn’t hear the gunfire, but saw security officials reacting to something.

“We heard the cascading sounds of plates dropping, things being pushed out of the way rapidly as Secret Service was trying to secure this room,” he said. 

As that sound came toward him, everyone went under the table, he said. 

“Secret Service quickly got here,” he said, and agents held Miller and Kennedy there at first. “Once the president was secure and out, then Secret Service began to move others.”

Margaret Brennan

“Face the Nation” moderator and chief foreign affairs correspondent Margaret Brennan said she was seated close to the dais when she heard a loud noise in the back left of the room and commands to get down.

“We got down, hiding under the table. It was clear something had happened,” she said. 

“Around us, the Secretary of Defense (Pete Hegseth) was sitting at the table across. He and his detail were on alert,” Brennan said. “I asked him what happened, he said, ‘I don’t know.'”

Brennan also shared a video on social media in which yells of “God Bless America!” and “USA!” can be heard.

Olivia Rinaldi

CBS News White House reporter Olivia Rinaldi was reminded of the assassination attempt on Mr. Trump during a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, in 2024, when she heard the gunshots at the Correspondents’ Dinner.

“We heard what sounded like three to four successive shots,” Rinaldi said. “Originally it sounded like plates had fallen, loud noises. But I was there in Butler, that was gunfire and we knew it.”

“We could also smell the gunpowder that was fired,” she added. 

Nicole Sganga

Homeland security and justice correspondent Nicole Sganga was at a table close to where the sound of gunfire was heard. 

“We were around our salad courses, and we heard a series of shots and then we heard Secret Service command that everyone get down and now everyone is underneath their tables,” she said in a video recorded while she hid under her table.