Veteran feds cry foul on White House cocaine probe: ‘This is a cover-up’
The conclusion of an 11-day Secret Service probe that failed to find which White House staff member or visitor left cocaine in the West Wing looks like a whitewash, former federal investigators told The Post Thursday.
“This is a cover-up. How can they say they have no leads?” one ex-agent said. “It is a restricted area and they have a log book, you don’t have to be Columbo to figure out who was there.
“Suppose it was anthrax,” the same person raged. “Would they have the same answer?”
“We have a tale of two countries,” another former fed said. “They identified hundreds of people who were in the Capitol building on Jan. 6 after an extensive investigation, but they don’t know who left something in an 8 x 10 room in the White House?”
The Secret Service concluded its inquiry Thursday without identifying a suspect, citing “a lack of physical evidence” after FBI forensic testing yielded no fingerprints and insufficient DNA evidence.
“Without physical evidence, the investigation will not be able to single out a person of interest from the hundreds of individuals who passed through the vestibule where the cocaine was discovered,” the protective agency said in a statement.
The cocaine was discovered July 2 by an agent in a storage locker inside the West Wing’s basement entrance — one floor below the Oval Office and just feet from the Situation Room.
Because so much sensitive material passes through the area, no cameras are focused there — and were thus unable to pick up footage of the culprit depositing the white, powdery substance in one of the vestibule’s 182 lockers, a source familiar with the investigation confirmed to The Post.
Republicans on the House Oversight Committee who were briefed on the investigation’s findings Thursday morning said less than a gram of cocaine entered the building without being detected and that roughly 500 potential suspects were identified.
The FBI probed hundreds of suspects in the wake of the events of Jan. 6, 2021, with more than 1,000 indicted on federal charges.
But the Secret Service did not pursue any potential suspects in the drug probe, frustrating congressional Republicans.
“My question to them was, have they drug-tested this list of 500 potential suspects that brought an illegal substance, or drug, cocaine, into the White House?” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) told reporters. “Their answer was ‘no’ and that they’re unwilling to do so.”
“You can’t tell me in the White House, with 24/7 surveillance, in a cubby hole by the Situation Room that they don’t know who delivered it there,” House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) told Fox News. “We should get an answer to the question. It just seems to me that in America today anything involving Biden Inc. gets treated differently than anything else and that shouldn’t be the case.”
“Every time there’s something strange going on with President Biden or his family, or anything regarding his administration or the White House, no one can ever seem to find an answer,” Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) also said. “This is one of the most secure locations in the world, some of the best law enforcement officers in the world — and they don’t have any answers.”
The cocaine forced a brief evacuation on the evening of July 2 and a DC Fire and EMS hazmat team descended on the executive mansion to conduct preliminary tests for dangerous substances. An initial test found cocaine, and an FBI lab later confirmed the result.
The president had departed the White House two days earlier to spend the weekend before Independence Day at Camp David — along with first son Hunter Biden, who wrote about his addiction to crack cocaine in his 2021 memoir “Beautiful Things.”
Hunter agreed last month to plead guilty to tax misdemeanors and plans to enter into a diversion program for lying about abusing drugs when purchasing a firearm. Pending a judge’s approval, the first son is expected to avoid jail time and serve two years of probation.
