Politics
NEW: Buried Report Reveals What Happened To Cocaine In Biden White House
Within hours of cocaine being discovered inside the West Wing of the Biden White House, security officials moved swiftly to make it disappear forever.
That’s the conclusion of an internal report, until recently buried, which sheds new light on how U.S. Secret Service agents serving the family of President Joe Biden made quick work of the evidence critical to an investigation which never revealed the source of the drugs. Even now, with Republicans controlling every lever of power in Washington, D.C., an audit of how the cocaine was handled has been hard to come by.
Only through dogged reporting by Susan Crabtree of RealClearInvestigations are new details coming to light.
Last month, Crabree reported that the Secret Service moved swiftly to destroy the bag of cocaine found inside a locker in the West Wing. A report by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, titled simply “Destruction,” shows that the drugs were incinerated within 24 hours of their discovery.
The document, obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, doesn’t list a date when the cocaine was destroyed. But a chain of custody shows that the Secret Service turned the cocaine over to D.C. Fire Department hazmat technicians and the FBI for testing to authenticate it before retaking possession.
Two days later, the drugs were passed to the D.C. metropolitan police for destruction. The Secret Service closed its investigation into the matter nine days later.
Crabtree notes in her report that the D.C. police force owns an Environmental Protection Agency-approved incinerator which must be used for the destruction of narcotics. No entry date for the destruction of the cocaine was listed in the report.
Last week, FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino announced he was reopening the investigation, citing a lack of conclusions by Secret Service investigators during the Biden administration.
“Well, I get a kick out of it on social media,” Bongino told Fox News’ Sean Hannity. “People say, ‘This case isn’t a big deal. I don’t care.’ Well, I care. … You don’t care that a [potentially] hazardous substance made its way into the White House? We didn’t know what it was, and we don’t seem to have answers? Well, we’re going to get them. I’ve got a great team on it.”
The report also states that the FBI retained a second key piece of evidence: an envelope of three tubes of DNA that were pulled from the cocaine.
Crabtree writes that it’s unclear how much DNA was obtained, and the Secret Service has previously said that its analysis of who may have first handled the drugs was inconclusive.
Neither the FBI or Secret Service have released the laboratory results to the public. Experts told RealClearPolitics the only way to definitely link the cocaine to a source would be to run the DNA samples against state and national criminal databases.
“The only way to really tell, is to test it again and see what happens,” Gary Clayton Harmor, chief forensic DNA analyst at the Serological Research Institute in Richmond, California, told RCP. “Some labs will test anything, and others are more reluctant if they think it’s not a good enough sample to [test against national DNA databases]. The FBI, knowing them, they’re probably very conservative, and it may be that they said, ‘Nope, there’s not enough here to do anything meaningful with.’ It really depends on who’s doing the testing and how they did it.”
Two sources told Crabtree that video evidence from the day of the cocaine’s discovery shows West Wing staffers shuffling into a vestibule where the locker containing the cocaine sat, just dozens of feet from the Situation Room. The Secret Service, however, never interviewed those individuals, citing the lack of DNA evidence on the drugs.
