Colleen Cullen

just a girl with a lot of je ne sais quoi

[Colleen Cullen @cecchicago]

@PeteButtigieg @JoJoFromJerz 2026 version of “let them eat cake”

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

I am a senior coordinating producer for the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner. I have worked eleven of these. I was backstage at the Washington Hilton when the shots were fired.

The first thing I heard was not the gunfire. It was glass.

A champagne flute hit the floor of the International Ballroom at approximately 9:47 PM. Then a second. Then the sound that I have since been told was a 12-gauge shotgun, which from inside the ballroom sounded like a heavy door slamming in a parking garage. Then the Secret Service moved. They moved the President, the Vice President, the First Lady through the east corridor in under ninety seconds, which is protocol, which is practiced, which is the one part of the evening that worked exactly as it was designed.

Everything else was improvised.

I know this because I ordered the wine. 94 tables. Two bottles per table. 188 bottles of a Willamette Valley pinot noir that the Association selected in February after a tasting committee spent three meetings debating between Oregon and Burgundy. Oregon won. The budget was $14,200. I signed the invoice. I can tell you the vintage. I can tell you the distributor. I can tell you the per-bottle cost because I negotiated it down from $89 to $76.

What I cannot tell you is how 147 of those bottles left the building during an active shooter evacuation.

I can tell you what I saw. A correspondent from a network I will not name picked up two bottles on her way to the east exit. Full bottles. One in each hand. She was wearing heels and she did not spill. A man in a tuxedo tucked one inside his jacket the way you'd shoplift a paperback at an airport bookstore. A woman picked up a bottle, looked at the label, put it back, and took a different one.

She checked the vintage. During an evacuation. That's editorial judgment under pressure.

The theme of the dinner was "A Free Press for a Free People." The banners were still hanging when the evacuation began. I know because I hung them. Twenty-three banners, navy blue, gold serif lettering, $11,400 for the set. They were still hanging when 2,600 guests were directed to the exits by Secret Service agents, one of whom had just taken a shotgun round in his ballistic vest and walked to the ambulance on his own feet.

The agent's vest costs approximately $800. The wine that left the building was worth $11,172 at Association cost. At restaurant markup, roughly $29,000. The guests saved more in wine than the vest that saved the agent.

That's priority.

The video went viral by 10:15 PM. Not the video of the evacuation. Not the Secret Service response. The wine. Three guests in formalwear grabbing bottles off white tablecloths while being told to move toward the exits, while a man with a shotgun stood in the same motor entrance where John Hinckley shot Ronald Reagan 45 years ago.

A woman near the service entrance was crying. She said "I just wanna go home." She was not holding wine. She was holding her phone. She was the only person I saw that night who looked afraid rather than inconvenienced.

That's the distinction. The rest of the ballroom did not look afraid. They looked interrupted. An active shooter at the WHCD is a logistical problem. The dinner was disrupted. The timeline was off. The after-party at the French Ambassador's residence would need to be rescheduled. These are contingency matters. Contingency matters have solutions. Fear is for people who attend events without security details.

I have produced eleven of these dinners. I have managed seating charts that require diplomatic-grade negotiations. I have handled comedians, cabinet secretaries, network anchors, and the editor of a major newspaper who once threatened to leave because his table was behind a column.

I have never, in eleven years, seen a guest leave a $76 bottle on the table during an evacuation. I have also never seen a guest check the label first. Both observations are consistent. The bottle is worth taking. The evacuation is worth surviving. The instinct is to do both simultaneously.

188 bottles placed. 41 recovered. 147 unaccounted for. One agent shot. Zero guests injured. Zero bottles broken.

A free press for a free people. The press is free. The wine was $76 a bottle. They took it anyway.

[Colleen Cullen @cecchicago]

@YourAnonNews @joerogan Surprised @joerogan isn’t on his knees with his mouth open.

[Colleen Cullen @cecchicago]

@ekw2hsm1 @Ahmed_hassan_za It was an open book test

[Colleen Cullen @cecchicago]

@HustleBitch_ Filler migration

[Colleen Cullen @cecchicago]

@KatieMiller @ClaytonKeller37 you agree with her take? Your silence and complicity is shameful.

[Colleen Cullen @cecchicago]

@cturnbull1968 usha = couch by proxy

[Colleen Cullen @cecchicago]

@ProjectLincoln @LindseyGrahamSC More like orange around his lips.

[Colleen Cullen @cecchicago]

@otokyo Pam Bondi

[Colleen Cullen @cecchicago]

@AGPamBondi Your day of judgement will come. Shame.

[Colleen Cullen @cecchicago]

@elonmusk Girl, nice try at a distraction from the Epstein files.

[Colleen Cullen @cecchicago]

@RepThomasMassie @RepRoKhanna Thank you for your #braverism

[Colleen Cullen @cecchicago]

@CountryFirstRep TBH, until the un-redacted files are released, NO ONE, especially those who have maintained party line silence during Trumps regime of hate get the benefit of the doubt.

McCain, maybe. He showed bravery. The rest still have a hell of a lot to prove.

[Colleen Cullen @cecchicago]

@MrPitbull07 More of this!

[Colleen Cullen @cecchicago]

@Ally_Sammarco She literally has a daughter that age. She is so morally corrupt and disgusting. Shame on you @megynkelly. It’s not “having a sex with a 15 yr old” it’s an adult raping a child. Period.

[Colleen Cullen @cecchicago]

@IvankaNews_ Your dad and convicted felon/racists/predators/swindlers like him in unchecked positions of power.

& honestly, people like you for enabling his behavior.

[Colleen Cullen @cecchicago]

@ThePatriotOasis I’d just like to publicly remind everyone that 2 thoughts can be true the same time: 1) I can think ZB is a POS for how he treated @BChickenfry & 2) I can applaud his public condemnation of ICE. These viewpoints are not mutually exclusive, please and thank you.

[Colleen Cullen @cecchicago]

@WhiteHouse Hey Siri, play “The smallest man who ever lived”

[Colleen Cullen @cecchicago]

@RpsAgainstTrump @SenBillCassidy This.

Grow a fucking pair @SenBillCassidy. You went to med school and spent majority of your life’s work advocating for patients and now you’re a cuckold who can’t even issue a tweet without compromising your medical expertise for a dictators ego.

[Colleen Cullen @cecchicago]

@atrupar @mtgreenee seems like you got distracted again with your far right talking points.

What happened to releasing the Epstein files?!??