House Majority Leader Steve Scalise heard the gunshots at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. He saw waitstaff duck for cover and Secret Service agents rush towards President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance.

“Some bad memories started coming back,” Scalise told NOTUS.

Scalise survived an assassination attempt while at a practice for the Congressional Baseball Game in 2017. A gunman opened fire and struck Scalise, nearly killing him and leading to a lengthy recovery.

Now, almost nine years later, Scalise found himself in a similar situation on Saturday as an armed man attempted to sprint into the Washington Hilton ballroom with two firearms in what federal law enforcement has determined was an attempt to assassinate Trump and other administration officials.

“Your instincts take over, and you say, ‘OK, let’s take cover and let law enforcement do what they do best.’ And they did,” Scalise said. “I personally experience Capitol Police’s professionalism on a daily basis, and they’re as good as it gets. But you saw the Secret Service, you saw other law enforcement that were part of the president’s detachment, and they all did what they’re trained to do, which is, they kept everybody in that room safe.”

Shortly after the Secret Service secured Trump and Vance, Scalise said, his security detail ran over to him and told him to “get ready to go.”

As they sprinted through the ballroom towards the exit, Scalise said he spotted Democratic Rep. Jared Moskowitz, who has said he was recently the target of an assassination attempt.

“We were moving fast towards the back, but then ultimately to a different exit and that’s where I saw Jared,” Scalise recalled. “And he sees me, and he says, ‘Can I go with you?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, grab him.’ And I said, ‘Stay close.’ And I told the detail, ‘You know, he’s with me.’ And then we just took off and went to a holding room.”

Scalise said the first thing he wanted to do after getting to the holding room was call his wife. He recalled how in 2017, the hardest part for his family was the day of the shooting because there were so many conflicting reports and “not a lot of information” about his condition and what had happened. So this time, he wanted to ensure he told her he was OK.

However, he couldn’t get a call out.

“It wasn’t until I got out of the building where I could get a signal and call her and we just had a real, kind of, personal moment there, talking about what happened,” Scalise said.

Scalise praised law enforcement for ensuring everybody remained safe and nobody was injured.

“This is always an interesting thing, you saw it — as everybody is protecting themselves, you’re looking around and you’re seeing law enforcement running towards danger and making sure to protect everybody,” he said. “It’s amazing. It’s a special calling to be a law enforcement officer.”