Why was there cocaine at the White House?: The Secret Service revealed over the holiday weekend that cocaine was found inside the White House. It’s unclear how it got there. Conservatives want to blame Hunter Biden.
Joe Biden Has a New Problem at the White House
The “white powdery substance” that was found on Sunday evening at the White House was cocaine, the New York Times reported.
President Joseph Biden and his family were not at the White House when the substance was found, but were visiting Camp David for the weekend.
The discovery of the material led to “a brief shutdown of some of the White House campus as response workers assessed whether the substance was hazardous.” The building was evacuated, although presumably, not many people were around on the Sunday night of a holiday weekend, with the president and his family not present.
A hazmat crew later determined “we have a yellow bar saying cocaine hydrochloride,” as was heard on a website that logs the District of Columbia Fire Department’s dispatch communications.
The Secret Service, per the Times, later revealed that the cocaine was discovered in a “work area of the West Wing.”
“The item was sent for further evaluation and an investigation into the cause and manner of how it entered the White House is pending,” Secret Service spokesman Anthony Guglielmi told the newspaper.
Conservative Media Says Blame Hunter Biden
How did the cocaine get there, and whose was it? That remains unclear, and no reporting has yet implicated any individual. But as with most things, much of the conservative media went straight to one name: Hunter Biden.
The Daily Mail, for their part, declared that “Trolls are speculating that the president’s addict son is the source of the illegal substance.”
“You have got to be kidding me. Cocaine was found at the WH and authorities aren’t saying exactly where it was found. If it’s the Old Executive Office Building, it’s likely staff. If it’s the mansion, it’s likely Hunter,” former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer tweeted.”Reporters do your job.”
There is has been nothing reported from news reports indicating that the cocaine belonged to any particular individual. There have various dodgy reports in recent months about Hunter Biden living at the White House, but that hasn’t been substantiated either.
This is not the first time that cocaine use has been alleged at the White House.
In the mid-1990s, an FBI agent named Gary Aldrich claimed that Clinton White House staffers had used cocaine and other drugs. Two decades later, in 2016, when Hillary Clinton was running for president, a former Secret Service agent named Gary J. Byrne wrote a book called “Crisis of Character: A White House Secret Service Officer Discloses His Firsthand Experience with Hillary, Bill, and How They Operate,” which also alleged cocaine use in the Clinton White House.
“There were some drug issues,” Byrne told the New York Post in 2016. “Some people would come in to work in the morning, and they were barely walking, they would drop stuff off at the office, and go to the restroom where they would come out minutes later happy as a clown.”
In 1989, President George H.W. Bush infamously held up a bag of crack cocaine on live television during a White House address, claiming that the drugs had been seized days earlier from drug enforcement agents in a park near the White House.
Reporter Michael Isikoff looked into the backstory of that, wondering how likely it was that there had been a drug bust in Lafayette Park just days before the presidential address. Isikoff’s report determined that the bust had been set up for the exact purpose of the president being able to mention it in a speech.
Various candidates have been accused of past cocaine use, including George W. Bush during his first run for president in 2000. Barack Obama had admitted to some youthful cocaine use in his memoir, which rival Democrats considered using against him in the 2008 primaries.
Expertise and Experience: Stephen Silver is a Senior Editor for 19FortyFive. He is an award-winning journalist, essayist and film critic, who is also a contributor to the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Broad Street Review and Splice Today. The co-founder of the Philadelphia Film Critics Circle, Stephen lives in suburban Philadelphia with his wife and two sons. Follow him on Twitter at @StephenSilver.
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