Former Secret Service Kimberly Cheatle isn’t out of the woods yet. She tried to sneak out in the dead of night after a shambolic congressional appearance following the assassination attempt on Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13. Cheatle, at the time, remained defiant that she was the best to lead the agency despite this catastrophic failure in protecting the former president. More updates about this attempt only reinforce the embarrassing security flaws that led to this event. Cheatle resigned, but lingering questions, specifically that of a cover-up, lingered.
Before she bolted on July 23, Cheatle has been named as the official who allegedly wanted to destroy the cocaine that was found near the Situation Room of the West Wing—another embarrassing incident to befall the Biden White House. To make matters worse, the Secret Service concluded that they couldn’t identify whose cocaine it was, which is facially untrue. The White House is supposedly the most secure official residence in the world. The surveillance infrastructure here couldn’t identify anything. Susan Crabtree at RealClearPolitics penned a lengthy article about cocaine-gate, rehashed why it couldn’t be hidden from the media, and the Secret Service’s haphazard investigation that was meant to avoid getting to the truth (via RealClearPolitics):
Former Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle and others in top agency leadership positions wanted to destroy the cocaine discovered in the White House last summer, but the Secret Service Forensics Services Division and the Uniformed Division stood firm and rejected the push to dispose of the evidence, according to three sources in the Secret Service community.
Multiple heated confrontations and disagreements over how best to handle the cocaine ensued after a Secret Services Uniformed Division officer found the bag on July 2, 2023, a quiet Sunday while President Biden and his family were at Camp David in Maryland, the sources said.
At least one Uniformed Division officer was initially assigned to investigate the cocaine incident. But after he told his supervisors, including Cheatle and Acting Secret Service Director Ron Rowe, who was deputy director at the time, that he wanted to follow a certain crime-scene investigative protocol, he was taken off the case, according to a source within the Secret Service community familiar with the circumstances of his removal.
Secret Service spokesman Anthony Guglielmi did not immediately return RCP’s request for comment.
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Hunter Biden had a well-documented addiction to cocaine, crack cocaine, and other substances for many years but repeatedly claimed to be sober since 2021, an assertion that has prompted President Biden to often proclaim how “proud” he is of his son. While neither Joe nor Hunter Biden were at the executive mansion when the cocaine was found, it was discovered after a period when Hunter had been staying there.
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Normally, the discovery of cocaine or another illegal narcotic in the White House complex or in and around the first family and their staff wouldn’t come to light at all.
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.
But it wasn’t a member of President Biden’s regular detail who found the bag of cocaine just two days before the July 4 holiday last year. Instead, a member of the agency’s Uniformed Division, which is charged with protecting the facilities and venues for presidents and other agency protectees, discovered the substance in the White House complex while conducting routine rounds of the building.
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The officer who first found the bag with a white substance immediately flagged it as a potentially hazardous substance, worried that the bag of white power could contain deadly anthrax or ricin.
A Technical Security Division, or TSD, investigator would normally be deployed to the scene. These investigators, sometimes wearing hazmat suits, can identify different types of hazardous substances and explosives and work to quickly remove or defuse them. However, the TSD investigator was not called in on a Sunday evening of a holiday weekend. Instead, a Secret Service officer or agent called in the District of Columbia Fire and Emergency Medical Service Department, who evacuated the White House complex while they tested the white substance on site, determining it was cocaine.
Because the press was part of the evacuation, there was no way to hide the information about the discovery, and the Secret Service leaders quickly shifted to crisis communications mode. Meanwhile, the substance and packaging were treated as evidence and sent to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s National Biodefense Analysis and Countermeasures Center, which again analyzed it for biothreats. Those tests also came back negative for hazardous material.
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…Secret Service leaders, under pressure from Cheatle and other top agency officials, chose not to run additional searches for DNA matches or conduct interviews with the hundreds of people who work in the White House complex.
“That’s because they didn’t want to know, or even narrow down the field of who it could be,” a source stated. “It could have been Hunter Biden, it could have been a staffer, it could have been someone doing a tour – we’ll never know.”
Guglielmi added that extensive interviews at the time the figure was around 500 people could strain agency resources and lead to civil liberties violations. As for the cocaine, Crabtree added that the point at which Cheatle or her minions tried to coerce the Forensics Services Division to destroy the evidence. She added that Matt White, the vault supervisor, did receive a call from on high to get rid of the drugs, though protocol dictates that such evidence be retained for at least seven years, according to sources who spoke to Crabtree. When it was determined that the cocaine would not be destroyed, Cheatle was reportedly irate.
Suppose Cheatle was willing to cover up the cocaine. What else was she willing to do, especially in an incident that placed the agency in a terrible light, knowing she had the full backing of the Biden family? Cheatle and Jill are gal pals. Maybe a new president, Congress, and Secret Service director are needed to get to the bottom of how cocaine just happened to be found in the West Wing.
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