The Answer Is Blowin’ in the Wind

When the White House “cocaine stash” story plopped into America’s laps like a Fourth of July pick-me-up back on the holiday weekend, it felt like the pause that refreshes in the corridors of power. Here we were, presented with a mystery worthy of Sherlock Holmes himself — an attempt to smuggle drugs into a secured place where a known recovering addict lives. And there was ample reason to believe that the perpetrator would ultimately be identified, given that people who enter the White House on a low-traffic weekend in an area fully covered by surveillance cameras tend to be noticeable when shedding illegal drugs outside a security checkpoint.

Alas, it looks like the trail has hit a surprising and dismaying dead end. The Associated Press reports: “No fingerprints, DNA sample or leads from cocaine found at the White House, the Secret Service says.” By gum, the dastardly drug demon seems to have gotten away with it. The Secret Service apparently sent the mystery bag of blow to those crack experts at the FBI for “a sophisticated FBI crime lab analysis” — always reassuring; the FBI is universally trusted — and yet the cocaine cache came back clean of all identifying information. “Without physical evidence,” the Secret Service informs us, “the investigation will not be able to single out a person of interest from the hundreds of individuals who passed through the vestibule where the cocaine was discovered.”

Before you roll your eyes, consider: If nothing else, you’ve got to hand it to our mystery culprit. It’s one thing to be stupid enough to take a sack of Colombian marching powder with you into the White House; it’s another thing entirely to do so and still get away with it because you are prepared for a Moriarty-like criminal escape act at a moment’s notice.

Do I jest? Marvel at how smooth a criminal the attempted smuggler must have been, able to wipe a magic 8-ball of coke clean of prints and DNA while in a rush after U-turning away from a security line at the last second. (Most people don’t normally carry a clean microfiber cloth and 1:1 water/rubbing alcohol solution with them for clearing trace evidence, so that’s a hugely lucky break right there.) Or perhaps our foiled mule planned in advance and was wearing gloves? Clever lad (or lass?): Those wouldn’t stand out on camera in the White House vestibule on a July day in Washington with the temp topping off at 91 degrees.

Even more impressive was how our would-be contrabandist somehow chose the one place in the White House vestibule area not to be covered by multiple angles of camera surveillance when he deposited his stash before bolting. The mission might have been impossible, but tip your cap to a stone-cold operator who knows how to cut his losses and bail out like a pro. This took “Ethan Hunt breaking into the CIA”–level expertise and sangfroid, even in defeat.

And all done under the watchful eye of the Secret Service, no less. It’s a disappointing blemish on their record, because the competence with which the Treasury Department’s finest handles its duties has been the agents’ hallmark — really their defining quality — ever since a flood of maniacs began hopping the fence en masse during the Obama years, and the Service responded in turn by hopping into bed with Colombian hookers. (Also later: potentially hopping into bed with bribery.) So maybe they really just are the Keystone Kops, so befuddled and hopelessly clueless that even attempted White House drug mules under panopticon surveillance can evade detection.

Or maybe there is another explanation.

It would be churlish of me to state outright that I think the Secret Service is lying to us about their inability to identify who brought the cocaine into the White House, so let me instead gently suggest that the Secret Service might be lying to us. It’s not as if there is any shortage of precedent here; the Secret Service’s oath may be to the Constitution, but their loyalty historically has belonged to the president and his family (especially in the post-JFK era), not to his political enemies in the other party, and certainly not to the prying eyes of the media. The job of guarding the president, his family, and his residence is a political one as much as a professional one in the sense that trust and discretion are every bit as important as physical bravery and competence — especially when one must, to name a random example for no reason, play babysitter to a recidivist drug felon who also happens to be the president’s sole surviving son.

So I would certainly never say, as Noah Pollak did, that “this is like if the Hamburglar lived at the White House and all the hamburgers got stolen and the Secret Service was like we just don’t have any leads, not sure what happened to all those hamburgers.” (That sort of corrosive humor has no place in the pages of National Review.) The jury remains out as to the culprit. But forgive me my cynicism if I am asked to swallow the claim that the Secret Service has no idea who that culprit is. Either they do, or half the people working White House security should have been sacked a week ago.