Following an armed man's attempt to charge into the annual White House Correspondents' Association dinner on April 25, 2026,
Law enforcement took the accused attacker, whom The Associated Press named as Cole Tomas Allen, into custody after gunfire reportedly left a Secret Service agent with non-life-threatening injuries.
The rumor spread (archived) alongside a Fox News clip showing a reporter calling live on air to describe how, before the attempted attack, she was seated next to White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt's husband who, she claimed, told her to "be very safe." While recounting her story, the reporter's audio abruptly cut off. The anchor attributed this to phone signal issues.
Multiple people interpreted the call's abrupt ending as an attempt to prevent the reporter from revealing the attack was staged. For example, one X user wrote, "@FoxNews JUST CUT OFF A REPORTER AS SHE SAID SOMEONE TOLD HER BEFORE THE SHOOTING THAT IT WAS GOING TO HAPPEN?!?!?"
The Fox News clip is authentic, meaning not generated or edited using artificial intelligence. As of this writing, there is no viable evidence the attack on the dinner was staged.
The reporter later said on X that her phone was cut off because there was barely any service in the ballroom and that Leavitt's husband was talking to her about safety in general. Her audio also cut off at different points during her call to Fox News.
Timeline of events
On April 25, as Fox News was covering the attack live, reporter Aishah Hasnie called in from the Washington Hilton hotel ballroom following an emergency evacuation. During her call, her voice cut out several times, seemingly due to the poor cell phone signal. She said (emphasis ours):
They are clearing out the ballroom, and there's a protocol in place. What they're doing is they're having any congressional members that are inside the ballroom still, sort of gather in a place where they're going to take them personally, Capitol police will escort them and drive them to their homes just out of an abundance of caution. [...] We have been on the phones, we've been reporting live, we've been working sround the clock, we're trying to get to a camera right now actually for you guys [audio briefly cuts off]. [...]
I was sitting next to Karoline Leavitt the press secretary's husband. He was one of our guests, he was seated right next to me. Right as the dinner was starting, the national anthem happened and then he kind of leaned over and said, "You know, I watched you on TV, you do a great job. You need to be very safe." And he was just very serious when he said that to me, and he kind of looked around the room and said, "There are some [audio cuts off]."
The audio cut off for the final time at the end of this clip. The audio was also interrupted around the 0:30, 1:07, and 1:27 marks.
Following the end of her call, the Fox News anchor said, "Sounds like we lost Aishah's phone there. This happens by the way, especially when you have so many people attempting to utilize the same cell service at the same time."
A few hours later on April 26, Aishah posted a follow up statement (archived) on X, saying Leavitt's husband was talking about safety in general "because the world is crazy":
Our calls were dropping, because there is barely any service in that ballroom. To finish the story, he was telling me to be careful with my own safety because the world is crazy. Which is what my own father and other people have also said to me recently. He was expressing his concern for my safety. I was going to say - before I lost my signal - that it was unfortunate that only a short time later, this all happened. When we heard people shouting "get down", he jumped into action and made sure myself and others at our table got on the ground. He was heroic in his actions and I will forever be grateful.
In sum, there is evidence bad signal repeatedly interrupted the phone line. However, given we were not in the Fox News studio at the time, it is not possible to say with absolute certainty whether the line failed due to the patchy signal or because it was purposely cut. As such, we have left this claim unrated.
Snopes has previously covered other false reports about the shooting being staged, including Leavitt saying there would be "shots fired" beforehand as evidence of a planned attack. We noted the phrase "shots fired" is a common figure of speech that refers to someone making jokes or jabs at another person. There is no evidence Leavitt's remark referenced the shooting before it happened.