After Shooting, Feds Step Up Push for Ballroom

A weekend shooting just outside the White House has given the Trump administration new fuel in its fight to build a controversial presidential ballroom. In a Sunday court filing, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche argued the incident "underscores" the need for what he called a state-of-the-art secure facility for President Trump, backing the Justice Department's effort to defeat a lawsuit by the National Trust for Historic Preservation that aims to halt the $400 million project, the Hill reports.

• The project "includes state of the art security features to repel all attacks against the President, his family, his staff, and esteemed visitors," Blanche wrote. "These include a heavy steel, drone proof roof, missile resistant and drone proof columns, bullet, ballistic, and blast proof glass, Military grade venting for air conditioning and heating, and much more."

The gunman, identified as 21-year-old Nasire Best, was shot and killed by Secret Service officers after opening fire near 17th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue on Saturday evening; a bystander was wounded, and Trump was inside the White House but not affected, officials said. Blanche labeled the shooting a "second attempted assassination" of Trump in a month, following an earlier incident at the White House Correspondents' dinner. Blanche wrote that the ballroom is being built so that the president "can perform his constitutional duties in a safe and heavily secured facility," CBS News reports. Without the ballroom, he wrote, the president "cannot safely conduct the business of the United States."

Last month, a judge temporarily blocked construction of the ballroom in response to the trust's lawsuit, but an appeals court allowed work to continue ahead of a hearing in early June. A Republican push to add $1 billion in federal security funding was recently blocked by the Senate parliamentarian. GOP senators said that even if it was approved, they didn't have enough votes to add it to a bill to fund ICE and the Border Patrol. The Secret Service said Sunday that a bystander shot on Saturday remained in serious but stable condition, the AP reports. Best was taken into custody last year when he approached a White House checkpoint and claimed to be Jesus Christ.