Here's My Puzzle Over The White House Cocaine

I certainly agree that the unanswered question of who brought the baggie into the cubby outside the Sit Room is important, but I'm less and less convinced the answer has much to do with Hunter. Let's take the latest theory from Dan Bongino, a former Secret Service agent who's been serving as the vehicle for unnamed colleagues still on the force who are expressing their skepticism about the investigation. As of Tuesday, he was saying:

“Let’s just say a friend called me up and said, ‘Don’t preclude the possibility that the cocaine found in the White House there was not accidentally left behind.’ In other words, it was left there deliberately for someone to find, and let you say someone else may have found it. So that’s the story I kind of heard from someone who may know a little something about something. We’ll see what happens, but they know who it is. I’m sure of it.”

As best I can translate this, he seems to be saying that the baggie was something like a dead drop, a dealer or some intermediary left the baggie in a place where its intended recipient could find it, and the drop somehow went awry until the uniformed officers found it on a routine search that Sunday night.

But that theory goes only so far. According to ABC News reporting on the Secret Service briefing to Congress, Rep. Tim Burchett said the bag contained less than a gram of cocaine. But every indication we have is that Hunter has been a longtime addict, and he failed a drug test in the Navy as of October 2014.

Much more recent photos that I covered in this post appear to show Hunter snorting at public White House events. Both his long history with drugs and the apparent frequency of his use suggests he's a confirmed addict, and this means he needs much more than just a small bag containing less than a gram to get through the day. According to this site, "Though people use Cocaine at different rates depending on their addiction and tolerance to its effects, consistent users usually use up to 5 grams per day."

So a random dead drop of a single baggie doesn't seem reasonable for someone who likely needs as many as five of those baggies a day, or 35 a week. But if, as is generally speculated, Hunter is currently living at the White House, or at least is there pretty frequently, he would need a delivery system that's much more reliable and capable of supplying a much more significant amount. So on one hand, I don't think the baggie outside the Sit Room had anything to do with Hunter. On the other, we've got the question of how a much larger quantity must in fact be finding its way to him.

I'm surprised that nobody is probing Dan Bongino over this question. He can't be that naive about how much cocaine an addict like Hunter uses and how a single baggie in a dead drop won't suit the purpose. But at the same time, every indication we have is that Hunter indulges all his vices on an industrial scale, to the point that his Secret Service bodyguards must be fully aware of what he's up to, and that's got to be well beyond a baggie in a cubby now and then.

In fact, I don't see how the Secret Service Biden family detail can't be directly enabling Hunter's vices. But nobody's passing the word about this to Bongino? That just doesn't fit. Either Bongino is completely out of the loop, or he isn't telling the full story.

This brings me to yesterday's hearing at the House Oversight Committee, in which Rep Marjorie Taylor Greene discussed evidence showing Hunter purchased an airplane ticket for a supposed "paralegal" to travel to Los Angeles and back to have sex with him, paid for with law firm funds. (I believe this is the series of episodes from late 2018 and early 2019 covered in this story at the UK Daily Mail.)

This level of vice becomes an ingrained habit. The semi-official line is that once Hunter married Melissa Cohen in the spring of 2019, he got clean, changed his ways, and has become a model of filial respectability, but this is hard to believe, especially since he's so seldom seen with Melissa these days, especially in the White House, and this brings up the question of how he satisfies his other industrial-level vices and how this relates to his status as a Secret Service protectee.

According to the Secret Service website, protectees include the President and Vice President of the United States and their immediate families, which includes Hunter.

Permanent protectees, such as the president and vice president, have special agents permanently assigned to them. . . . Protection for the President and Vice President of the United States is mandatory. All other individuals entitled to our protection may decline security if they choose.

The protection of an individual is comprehensive and goes well beyond surrounding the individual with well-armed agents. As part of our mission of preventing an incident before it occurs, we rely on meticulous advance work and threat assessments to identify potential risks to protectees.

It isn't entirely clear whether Hunter can selectively decline security, but especially if he's in residence at the White House, we've got to assume the Secret Service is fully aware of whom he's seeing, where he's going, who's visiting, and what they're all up to. At least in 2018 and 2019, this included violation of federal law, the Mann Act. Whether or not Hunter was an official protectee at a given time, we know there appears to have been a Secret Service network throughout this period that was doing cleanup work over things like his wrecked rental car in Arizona (fall 2016) and the firearm in the Wilmington dumpster (October 2018). There's never been a satisfactory explanation for either of these episodes.

As far as I can see, the Secret Service has been aware of Hunter violating federal law while Joe was vice president, in the interregnum when Joe was out of office between 2017 and 2021, and as best we can infer, while he's president now -- and beyond that, not just aware of it, but enabling it. Somebody needs to get real and tell Bongino to put up or shut up.