Photos of cocaine found at the White House last summer have been released for the first time, thanks to a Freedom of Information Act request to the Secret Service by the Daily Mail.
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The cocaine was found on July 2 inside a storage locker in the West Wing of the White House. The discovery led to a brief evacuation and emergency response. Officials who found the powder in a small plastic envelope in the heavily trafficked part of the White House initially suspected illegal drugs, but they ran tests to ensure that the powder was not a more dangerous substance.
The powder tested positive for cocaine in a laboratory analysis. However, the Secret Service never found out whom the cocaine belonged to, concluding its investigation in just 11 days.
The agency said it was unable to find a culprit due to “lack of physical evidence” – there wasn’t sufficient DNA or fingerprints on the bag to pinpoint a suspect. “Without physical evidence, 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,” the Secret Service said in a statement, as reported by The New York Post.
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The Secret Service managed to narrow down its list of suspects to 500, but closed the investigation after being unable to find the culprit.
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A person familiar with the case told Daily Mail that storage lockers are not used by the president’s staff. Instead, they are used by people visiting the White House.
Visitors are not assigned a specific locker but can choose one and then take a key.
The source said that in all likelihood, someone taking a tour of the White House had left the bag of cocaine behind. President Joe Biden was at Camp David with members of his family for the holiday weekend when the powder was discovered.
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