Latest news with #EnvironmentalProtectionAgency-approved
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
USSS Ordered Destruction of White House Cocaine Day After Closing Case
Two years after the U.S. Secret Service discovered a bag of cocaine in the White House in July, 2023, documents showing orders for its destruction within 24 hours after the agency closed the case are raising new questions about the scrupulousness of the investigation. A U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency documenttitled "Destruction" states that the bag of cocaine was sent to the Metropolitan Police Department for incineration. That document obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, doesnt display a date for the destruction. But other internal Secret Service records show that the cocaine was tested by the Secret Service, the D.C. Fire Department hazmat technicians, and the FBI before being sent back to the Secret Service for storage on July 12. Two days later, it was transferred to the D.C. police department for destruction. The Secret Service shut down the cocaine investigation 11 days after discovering it. The destruction of narcotics evidence must comply with environmental and safety regulations, and the D.C. police department has an Environmental Protection Agency-approved incinerator that federal agencies often use to destroy narcotics that are not involved in active legal cases. D.C. police officials referred all questions about the cocaines apparent destruction to the FBI. Theres no entry or date for the cocaines actual destruction. Early last week, FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino announced that he was re-opening the investigation into the cocaine found in the White House, as well as the leak of the Supreme Courts Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade and the discovery of a pipe bomb at the Democratic National Committee headquarters on Jan. 6, 2021. Bongino reiterated his commitment to getting to the bottom of those cases in a Wednesday night interview with Fox News Sean Hannity. "Well, I get a kick out of it on social media," Bongino said. "People say, 'This case isnt a big deal. I dont care. Well, I care. … You dont care that a [potentially] hazardous substance made its way into the White House? We didnt know what it was, and we dont seem to have answers? Well, were going to get them. Ive got a great team on it." While the cocaine bag found in the White House appears to have been destroyed, internal Secret Service documents show that the agency retained and stored a second piece of evidence, an envelope of three tubes of DNA that the FBI attained from the plastic bag of cocaine. Its unclear how much DNA those tubes contain, though the Secret Service has stood by its statements that the FBI found insufficient DNA to pursue any investigative leads. When the Secret Service closed its investigation into who left the cocaine in the White House on July 13, the agency issued a statement explaining its decision. Secret Service spokesman Anthony Guglielmi asserted that camera surveillance footage didnt provide any "investigative leads or any other means for investigators to identify who may have deposited" the cocaine in the White House, adding that FBI laboratory results "did not develop latent fingerprints and insufficient evidence was present for investigative comparisons." But neither the FBI nor the Secret Service has publicly released the FBI laboratory results, and DNA experts say the only fool-proof way to demonstrate whether sufficient DNA existed on the baggie now to run against hits in national and state criminal DNA databases is to test it again. "The only way to really tell, is to test it again and see what happens," Gary Clayton Harmor, chief forensic DNA analyst at the Serological Research Institute in Richmond, California, told RCP. "Some labs will test anything, and others are more reluctant if they think its not a good enough sample to [test against national DNA databases]. The FBI, knowing them, theyre probably very conservative, and it may be that they said, 'Nope, theres not enough here to do anything meaningful with. It really depends on whos doing the testing and how they did it." RealClearPolitics over the last week submitted a FOIA request for the FBI laboratory findings on the cocaine bag to the FBI and the Secret Service, but so far, the Secret Service FOIA office has denied RCPs request for expedited service and the FBIs counterpart has yet to respond. Two sources tell RCP that Secret Service surveillance video clearly shows all the White House staff and other individuals who entered through the West Wing entrance, where the agency says the cocaine was found inside a locker in a vestibule leading to a lobby area down the hall from the Situation Room. The Secret Service, however, never interviewed that group of individuals, citing the FBIs alleged inability to find sufficient DNA evidence to link the cocaine to anyone. There are strict narcotics evidence retention policies for many federal law enforcement agencies. Department of Justice agencies, including the DEA and the FBI, must retain the narcotics evidence for two months before destroying it unless it is deemed abandoned or no longer needed as evidence. The Homeland Security Department, which oversees the Secret Service, has no specific publicly documented policy for destroying abandoned narcotics. The Secret Service also did not respond to a request for any written policy it followed when it sent the cocaine bag to D.C. police for destruction. The push to quickly destroy the cocaine factors into allegations RCP reported last fall in which three sources alleged that former Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle and others in top agency leadership positions wanted to destroy the cocaine quickly but faced internal resistance from the Secret Service Uniformed Division and the Forensics Services Division. The Uniformed Division, which is charged with protecting the facilities and venues for presidents, was a key player in the decision-making because one of its officers had discovered the cocaine on July 2, 2023, a quiet Sunday when President Biden and his family were at Camp David in Maryland. On Sunday night, after Secret Service Technical Services Division officers couldnt identify the white substance, the Uniformed Division locked down the White House and called in the D.C. Fire Department hazmat teams to ensure that it wasnt anthrax or ricin. The discovery of the bag of cocaine posed a problem for Cheatle, who resigned in the face of bipartisan pressure after the July 13 assassination attempt against Donald Trump. 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 had prompted former 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. Cheatle became close to the Biden family while serving on Vice President Joe Bidens protective detail - so close that Biden tapped Cheatle for the director job in2022, in part because of her close relationship to first lady Jill Biden. During the feverish speculation in the days and weeks after the cocaines discovery, the White House refused to answer whether the cocaine came from a Biden family member and labeled as"irresponsible"reporters who asked about a possible link to Hunter or another Biden family member. Its unclear exactly when Cheatle and other top officials tried to persuade the Forensics Services Division to destroy the evidence. At some point during the brief investigation, Matt White, the vault supervisor, received a call from Cheatle or someone speaking on her behalf asking him to destroy the bag of cocaine because agency leaders wanted to close the case, according to two sources in the Secret Service community. Whites boss, Glenn Dennis, head of the Forensics Services Division, then conferred with the Uniformed Division, which first discovered the cocaine. At some point, Cheatle appears to have overruled Richard Macauley, who appears to have paid a price in his Secret Service career - at least temporarily - for standing his ground. At the time of the cocaines discovery, Macauley was serving as the acting chief of the Uniformed Division after the recent retirement of Alfonso Dyson Sr., a 29-year veteran of the agency. When Dyson left his position, Macauley, who is black, and was named the Secret Services Uniformed Division Officer of the Year in 2018, became acting director. Despite Cheatles push to hire and promote minority men and women, Macauley was passed over for the job of Uniformed Division chief in what some in the agency suspected was an act of retaliation for supporting those who refused to dispose of the cocaine. Cheatle brought in Mike Buck, an agent who was in retirement, to serve in the top U.D. role instead of Macauley. After Trump chose Sean Curran to lead the agency, however, Buck left, and Curran tapped Macauley to replace him. Shifting Secret Service public statements, overly redacted documents, and media misinterpretations have contributed to an avalanche of lingering questions about the cocaine. Several major media outlets initially reported that the Secret Service had discovered the drug in the White House library, citing a D.C. Fire EMS dispatch call that appeared to state that the substance was found there. This information was based on early communications from a firefighter on the hazardous materials team who radioed into headquarters about a "yellow bar saying cocaine hydrochloride" and another statement about "no match found in the library" during the response to the incident. Several hazmat experts tell RCP that the reference to the "library" was not a physical location in the White House but a reference to the chemical library from a handheld device known as a "Gemini" that fire departments and others use to identify substances. Mike Parsons, a product manager for Thermo Fisher Scientific, the company that manufactures the Gemini handheld device, said the term "library" is used to identify the collection of chemical spectra that the Gemini can identify and display on its screen. "The library is built on known samples and substances," Parsons said in an interview. "Its going to compare the spectra collected in the field to the spectra in the library and make an identification match." After correcting mistaken reports that the cocaine was found in the White House library, media reports then cited a Guglielmi statement that the cocaine was found in a "West Wing workspace." Days later, Guglielmi clarified further that it was found in a small locker in a vestibule near the West Executive Avenue entrance to the West Wing, a heavily trafficked area where visitors and lower-level staff store electronics before VIP tours. A FOIA-released internal Secret Service document further muddied the waters by claiming that the cocaine was found in the "[redacted] lobby floor," creating even more suspicion surrounding the location where the cocaine was first discovered. Sources familiar with the statement in a Secret Service Protective Division document said it was not a reference to the physical floor of a room, but the lobby level of the West Wing where the lockers were located in a vestibule leading into it. The Secret Service has confirmed that "locker 50," where the cocaine was allegedly left, has a missing key. Susan Crabtree is RealClearPolitics' national political correspondent.
Yahoo
04-05-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
How we tested the soil in Altadena and Pacific Palisades
Over three days in late March, four Los Angeles Times environment reporters and an editor fanned out across the Eaton and Palisades burn scars to collect 40 soil samples from residential properties: 10 in each burn area from properties where debris removal was completed by the Army Corps of Engineers and 10 in each burn area from the yards of standing homes. Read more: Treated Like Dirt: Uncovering the toxic soil lurking in L.A.'s burn zones At each stop, the team donned vinyl gloves and boot coverings to prevent the spread of contamination and collected five evenly spaced samples with a hand-held tool that takes 4-inch soil cores. At standing homes, we sampled throughout the yard. At destroyed properties, we sampled within the former structure's footprint, where the federal cleanup crews had cleared debris and scraped up to 6 inches of soil. Times journalists mixed these five samples in a lined bucket to create one 'composite' sample to be tested in the lab. This sample pattern is designed to account for a wide range of soil conditions on each property and serve as an average, since it is possible that one part of a given property might be fully devoid of metal contamination while another might be heavily polluted. Composite sampling is a common practice in wildfire recovery. Between every property, the team sanitized all soil collection equipment with distilled water and wipes, and changed gloves and boot covers — so that no potential toxins could accidentally track from one site to another. We stored the samples in lab-provided jars, and kept the samples refrigerated at 38-40 degrees. At the end of the collection week, our editor drove the samples to BSK Associates, a state-certified environmental testing laboratory that tested soil on behalf of the government following the 2018 Camp fire and 2024 Mountain, Park and Borel fires. BSK used an Environmental Protection Agency-approved method to test for 17 metals most often studied in post-fire recovery. To do this, BSK used an instrument that sorts out different elements from within the soil by mass and counts the atoms. Since each of these 17 elements has a unique atomic mass — for example, only lead has an atomic mass of 0.34 trillion billionths of a gram — BSK could then determine the concentration of the metals. Read more: When FEMA failed to test soil for toxic substances after the L.A. fires, The Times had it done. The results were alarming At each step of the process, our team and BSK meticulously documented the chain of custody for the samples, creating a record of, at each moment, which individual was responsible for the safekeeping of each individual sample. The Times' methodology rigorously followed soil-testing practices from previous official post-wildfire efforts. Our team reviewed documents outlining the response for the Camp and Woolsey fires, and spoke with soil-testing experts familiar with the standard methodology for California wildfires. To find participants, we identified standing properties using the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection's damage inspection data and properties that had finished debris removal using the Army Corps' dashboard. All participants consented to testing on their properties, and their exact addresses have been anonymized. The testing methodology used by The Times is a conservative reading. By using composite samples, high levels of contamination from one part of the property can become diluted by relatively uncontaminated sections elsewhere on the property. Read more: The L.A. wildfires left lead and other toxins in the soil of burn zones. Here are their health risks Further, due to cost considerations, The Times' methodology differed from typical postfire soil testing practices in one key way: In previous fires, soil testers would collect multiple composite samples for larger properties, roughly one sample per 500 square feet. Our team took only one composite sample per property, regardless of size. This means The Times' results had a greater potential to miss smaller contamination hot spots on properties. The Times found two properties cleared by the Army Corps in Altadena still had contamination above the state's typical health-based cleanup goals: one arsenic, one lead. Altadena's standing homes had arsenic, lead and mercury levels above typical cleanup goals, across three of the 10 homes our team tested. The Times found only a single reading above typical cleanup goals in the Palisades: a standing home with high levels of arsenic. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
Los Angeles Times
04-05-2025
- Science
- Los Angeles Times
How we tested the soil in Altadena and Pacific Palisades
Over three days in late March, four Los Angeles Times environment reporters and an editor fanned out across the Eaton and Palisades burn scars to collect 40 soil samples from residential properties: 10 in each burn area from properties where debris removal was completed by the Army Corps of Engineers and 10 in each burn area from the yards of standing homes. At each stop, the team donned vinyl gloves and boot coverings to prevent the spread of contamination and collected five evenly spaced samples with a hand-held tool that takes 4-inch soil cores. At standing homes, we sampled throughout the yard. At destroyed properties, we sampled within the former structure's footprint, where the federal cleanup crews had cleared debris and scraped up to 6 inches of soil. Times journalists mixed these five samples in a lined bucket to create one 'composite' sample to be tested in the lab. This sample pattern is designed to account for a wide range of soil conditions on each property and serve as an average, since it is possible that one part of a given property might be fully devoid of metal contamination while another might be heavily polluted. Composite sampling is a common practice in wildfire recovery. Between every property, the team sanitized all soil collection equipment with distilled water and wipes, and changed gloves and boot covers — so that no potential toxins could accidentally track from one site to another. We stored the samples in lab-provided jars, and kept the samples refrigerated at 38-40 degrees. At the end of the collection week, our editor drove the samples to BSK Associates, a state-certified environmental testing laboratory that tested soil on behalf of the government following the 2018 Camp fire and 2024 Mountain, Park and Borel fires. BSK used an Environmental Protection Agency-approved method to test for 17 metals most often studied in post-fire recovery. To do this, BSK used an instrument that sorts out different elements from within the soil by mass and counts the atoms. Since each of these 17 elements has a unique atomic mass — for example, only lead has an atomic mass of 0.34 trillion billionths of a gram — BSK could then determine the concentration of the metals. At each step of the process, our team and BSK meticulously documented the chain of custody for the samples, creating a record of, at each moment, which individual was responsible for the safekeeping of each individual sample. The Times' methodology rigorously followed soil-testing practices from previous official post-wildfire efforts. Our team reviewed documents outlining the response for the Camp and Woolsey fires, and spoke with soil-testing experts familiar with the standard methodology for California wildfires. To find participants, we identified standing properties using the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection's damage inspection data and properties that had finished debris removal using the Army Corps' dashboard. All participants consented to testing on their properties, and their exact addresses have been anonymized. The testing methodology used by The Times is a conservative reading. By using composite samples, high levels of contamination from one part of the property can become diluted by relatively uncontaminated sections elsewhere on the property. Further, due to cost considerations, The Times' methodology differed from typical postfire soil testing practices in one key way: In previous fires, soil testers would collect multiple composite samples for larger properties, roughly one sample per 500 square feet. Our team took only one composite sample per property, regardless of size. This means The Times' results had a greater potential to miss smaller contamination hot spots on properties. The Times found two properties cleared by the Army Corps in Altadena still had contamination above the state's typical health-based cleanup goals: one arsenic, one lead. Altadena's standing homes had arsenic, lead and mercury levels above typical cleanup goals, across three of the 10 homes our team tested. The Times found only a single reading above typical cleanup goals in the Palisades: a standing home with high levels of arsenic.
