Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) want
to know if there was a cover-up in the Biden White House’s cocaine-gate
fiasco last July. This development comes as new allegations have
resurfaced following the resignation of Secret Service Director Kimberly
Cheatle following the Trump assassination attempt on July 13. There are
allegations that Cheatle and other Secret Service officials pushed to
have the cocaine destroyed. When that nudge was not heeded, there were
reported retaliatory measures taken.
It's been reported that when a protectee’s detail finds illicit
materials, they're disposed of. Yet, it was a uniformed officer who
discovered the cocaine, with the initial concern that the powder was
anthrax or some other agent, the officer sounded the alarm, bringing
this circus to the media’s attention. The acting chief of the uniformed
division was passed over for promotion in the wake of this event.
Protocol from the evidence vault supervisor dictates that substances be
preserved for at least several years. The probe into cocaine-gate barely
lasted two weeks, with the agency essentially saying that it was too
burdensome to get to the truth. The FBI didn’t lift fingerprints from
the bag—there weren’t any—but DNA evidence was discovered, and a partial
hit was found. That’s where the trail ends (via RealClearPolitics):
Sen.
Ted Cruz and Rep. Darrell Issa are demanding answers from the Secret
Service about a possible cover-up and a “troubling pattern of
misconduct” surrounding the agency’s handling of cocaine discovered in
the White House last summer.
The two Republican lawmakers, who
serve in key Judiciary Committee roles in the Senate and the House,
cited revelations from a RealClearPolitics article last week that former
Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle and senior agency leaders
sought to destroy the cocaine discovered in the White House last summer.
Despite the push, leaders of the Forensics Services and the Uniformed
Divisions rejected efforts to dispose of the evidence and presumably are
keeping the bag of cocaine in a Secret Service evidence vault.
White
and his supervisor, Glenn Dennis, as well as Richard Macauley,
then-acting chief of the Uniformed Division, resisted pressure from
Cheatle and others to destroy the evidence. Afterward, however, Macauley
was passed over for the permanent position of Uniformed Division chief
despite receiving agency accolades, RCP reported last week. The decision
to bypass Macauley, a black man, raised eyebrows within the agency amid
a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion push that Cheatle championed.
Cheatle
chose a retired Secret Service top official to head the Uniformed
Division instead of Macauley, raising concerns in the agency that
passing over Macauley for the job was an act of retaliation. In 2018,
Macauley was named the Secret Services Uniformed Division Officer of the
Year. He would go on to serve one year, from February 2022 to January
2023, as deputy assistant sergeant at arms at the U.S. House of
Representatives.
[…]
Those two agencies found that it was
cocaine, not anthrax or another biothreat. While the FBI did not pick up
fingerprints on the small bag of cocaine, it found some DNA material,
according to three sources in the Secret Service community. The FBI also
reportedly said the agency ran the DNA material against national
criminal databases and “got a partial hit.”
The term “partial
hit” is vague in this context, but in forensics lingo usually means that
law enforcement found DNA matching a blood relative of a finite pool of
people.
[…]
The two Republicans also asked Rowe and White
to walk them through the “chain of custody” of the cocaine after it was
discovered and to define what a “partial DNA hit” means in layman’s
terms.
“Explain when the term is used and what it signifies,
especially in comparison to a full DNA hit,” their letter says. “Did it
reveal family members of the person who was in contact with the
cocaine?”
The pair also questioned whether a Uniformed Division
officer initially assigned to investigate the cocaine incident was
removed from the job because he wanted to follow the normal
investigative protocols, which led to disagreements with his
supervisors, including Cheatle and Rowe.
[…]
Other questions Cruz and Issa asked include:
- What
actions were taken to follow up on the DNA evidence found on the
cocaine packaging? Were these actions consistent with standard
investigative practices?
- Have any Secret Service employees
reported concerns or misconduct related to this investigation? If so,
what were these concerns and how were they addressed?
- What
measures are being implemented to prevent similar issues in the future?
Detail any changes to procedures or policies to ensure transparency and
accountability.
Also, the fact that no surveillance footage could be used in this
investigation is also suspect, given that this is arguably the most
secure residence in the world. There are sensors and cameras everywhere,
especially in the West Wing, where the cocaine was found, a stone’s
throw away from the Situation Room.
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