Secret Service Investigating After Cocaine Found at the White House

Multiple news sources are reporting that a white substance found at the White House on Sunday that prompted a brief evacuation of the facility was cocaine.

Summary

Multiple news sources are reporting that a white substance found at the White House on Sunday that prompted a brief evacuation of the facility was cocaine.

• Secret Service agents reportedly discovered the powder in a “work area” of the West Wing accessible to tour groups. The White House complex was evacuated at 8:45pm Sunday until a rapid test preliminarily confirmed that the power was cocaine.
• “On Sunday evening, the White House complex went into a precautionary closure as officers from the Secret Service Uniformed Division investigated an unknown item found inside a work area,” Secret Service spokesman Anthony Guglielmi told The Hill.
• “The DC Fire Department was called to evaluate and quickly determined the item to be non-hazardous. The item was sent for further evaluation and an investigation into the cause and manner of how it entered the White House is pending.”
• President Joe Biden was not at the White House when the cocaine was discovered. He and several members of his family spent the weekend at Camp David before returning to the White House on Independence Day.
• During the transition, the Biden White House allegedly told potential staffers that past marijuana use would not affect their ability to work at the White House, only to reverse course in March 2021 and fire five staffers and suspend dozens of others.
• Less than two years later, Biden pardoned thousands of people convicted of marijuana possession.
• None of those staffers were alleged to have used cocaine, but that incident is worth remembering two years. The White House’s inconsistency on the appropriateness of illegal drug use has been a consistent feature of this administration.

• The New York Times noted the discovery became public after a hazmat official sent a dispatch at 8:49pm on Sunday saying, “We have a yellow bar saying cocaine hydrochloride.” It’s unclear when, if ever, the Secret Service would have disclosed the discovery of the substance had this dispatch not been picked up by the public.
• CBS News and BBC News reported that the power was found in a storage area where White House staff and guests typically store their cell phones.
• CNN reported the substance was found in a Ziploc bag and was not found in any individual’s office, adding to the difficulty of identifying who in the White House was trying to hit the slopes.

• Fox News reported the substance’s discovery led to the deployment of a hazmat team to the White House in case the white powder was something far more lethal, like anthrax.
• The New York Post observed Hunter Biden watching the fireworks with his father at the White House hours after the discovery of cocaine at the White House was made public. The younger Biden is well-known for his prior addiction to crack cocaine and was at the White House on Friday before departing for Camp David with the rest of Biden’s family.
• National Review’s Jim Geraghty noted it is natural to suspect Hunter as “White House staffers are not known to be notorious drug users. All of them go through background checks, a lot of them have security clearances, and under federal law, using drugs, particularly a “hard drug” such as cocaine, would trigger an automatic revocation of your security clearance and be grounds for immediate termination.”

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© Dominic Moore, 2023