A claim circulated online in late April 2026 that acting U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche said during a news conference that collecting forensic ballistic evidence, such as spent bullets and shell casings, is "not an exact science," adding that sometimes a bullet is found and "sometimes it just disappears."
Users on social media claimed Blanche made the comment in response to a question about how many shots were fired at the White House Correspondents' Association dinner on April 24, 2026.
Some people included a clip of Blanche speaking alongside the claim.
Blanche says evidence recovery is "not an exact science" and that when weapons are fired [inside a hotel], "sometimes you find the bullet, and sometimes it just disappears."
🤔 pic.twitter.com/jzNmSt2VOl— Shannon Watts (@shannonrwatts) April 27, 2026
The quote is correctly attributed to Blanche. While he didn't use this exact phrasing in a single sentence, his full statement conveys the same meaning.
In sum, Blanche said that bullets are not always recovered during the course of a ballistics investigation, noting later that buckshot pellets used in shotguns can be particularly difficult to locate because they scatter upon impact.
During a news conference on April 27, 2026, viewable on C-SPAN, a reporter asked Blanche how many bullets were fired during the shooting. His answer, beginning at the 29:43 mark, was as follows (emphasis ours):
I want to be very careful in answering that question. Because this is— When you do ballistics evidence collection and research, it is very complicated. When you fire a bullet, the bullet ends up somewhere, sometimes you find it, sometimes you don't. So with that qualifier, we believe right now that there were five shots fired from the same firearm, but there's a team of folks looking at this that are experts and the evidence collection team that were in that area of the hotel where the shots were fired were at work all night. They have the evidence they collected, but it's not an exact science from the standpoint that, for example, the buckshot, when that's shot, it scatters everywhere and sometimes it just disappears, actually, depending on where it hits.
Snopes reached out to the Department of Justice for an update on the state of the ballistic evidence in the investigation and will update this article if we hear back.
In 2023, the Maryland Supreme Court ruled in favor of an appeal that alleged ballistic evidence used in a 2012 homicide case was reliable for matching bullets and casings to known types of firearms, but not for identifying the specific weapon from which it was fired. A CBS affiliate in Washington, D.C., reported that Jeffrey Gilleran, the chief of the forensics division at the Maryland Office of the Public Defender, said the ruling would affect hundreds of cases.
For further reading on the White House correspondents' dinner shooting, we investigated whether a photo shows Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth smiling after the incident.