A bag of cocaine that made national news last year after being found at the White House is striking a new blow against the reputation of the former director of the Secret Service.
According to a RealClearPolitics report published Monday, after the discovery of the drug July 2, 2023, then-Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle wanted the baggie destroyed.
And she was reportedly furious she didn’t get her way.
“A decision was made not to get rid of the evidence, and it really p*ssed off Cheatle,” a source said, according to the report by RealClearPolitics national political correspondent Susan Crabtree.
Secret Service spokesman Anthony Guglielmi flatly denied the allegation, Crabtree reported. However, the agency’s handling of the investigation leaves Americans viewing the action from the outside with plenty of room for questions.
No suspects were ever named in connection with the cocaine — the Secret Service closed its investigation after only 11 days, claiming there was simply no way to determine who was responsible for it. The move was widely mocked by Republicans and social media users.
In addition, the Secret Service Uniformed Division officer who was originally assigned to the case was removed after telling Cheatle and the Secret Servce then-Deputy Director (now acting-Director) Ron Rowe that he “wanted to follow a certain crime-scene investigative protocol,” Crabtree reported, citing unnamed sources.
With first son Hunter Biden’s long, sordid history of drug use a matter of record (including his own memoir), the discovery of cocaine in the White House presented “an unusual problem for Cheatle,” Crabtree wrote.
She was close to Jill Biden, which was reportedly how she got the top Secret Service job, according to a RealClearPolitics report in July.
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The finding of cocaine at the White House was sure to cause embarrassment to the Bidens — which it did.
Despite Guglielmi’s denial that Cheatle — or anyone else at the Secret Service — had sought to destroy the cocaine evidence, Crabtree reported that the action would have been routine if the drug had been found by a member of the Bidens’ security detail in an area of the White House reserved for the family.
“That’s because the president’s and first lady’s, as well as family members’ protective Secret Service details, the inner-most ring of protective agents assigned to the first family, would simply dispose of illegal drugs or other ‘contraband’ found in the White House, personal residences, or other private areas of the president, his family, and White House staff, according to three sources in the Secret Service community,” Crabtree wrote.
In that case, its presence would never have become public knowledge.
However, the cocaine baggie was found by a uniformed Secret Service officer who initially feared it could be a hazardous material and called the District of Columbia’s Emergency Medical Services Department.
Because the White House was evacuated while EMS tested the substance, and the evacuation included reporters, the news got out.
The baggie was sent to an FBI crime lab for testing. No fingerprints were reportedly found, but the lab did turn up a “partial hit” in searching for DNA evidence, according to Crabtree’s report.
“The term ‘partial hit’ is vague in this context, but in forensics lingo usually means law enforcement found DNA matching a blood relative of a finite pool of people,” Crabtree wrote.
But the Secret Service still chose to throw up its hands and close the investigation, citing the supposed impossibility of ever finding the person responsible without infringing on the civil rights of many others.
(The New York Post’s Miranda Devine scoffed at that excuse in a column published July 17, 2023: “Hah! Tell that to the hundreds of people rounded up by the FBI for just being in the vicinity of the Capitol on January 6, 2021.”)
So, in the end, Cheatle got her way in the cocaine “investigation,” which was apparently to make it go away — and as quickly as possible.
But its worth remembering in light of the events of this July, when a would-be assassin’s bullet came centimeters from killing former President Donald Trump and Cheatle’s leadership of the Secret Service came under fire to the point that she resigned.
In two major, public tests — the White House cocaine and the Trump assassination attempt — the Secret Service under Cheatle has already suffered national embarrassment.
After Monday’s RealClearPolitics report — and Secret Service denial or no Secret Service denial — Cheatle’s image isn’t getting better.
