Oh, the Associated Press doesn't say that the Joe Biden Regency allowed fentanyl rings to flood the US with their deadly product. In fact, the AP never mentions Biden or who ran the DEA and Department of Justice at the time. The timing in the first paragraph speaks volumes, however:
Even as it battled the deadliest drug epidemic in American history, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration permitted hundreds of thousands of fentanyl pills to hit the streets of New Mexico between 2023 and 2025, according to three current and former DEA agents and government records reviewed by The Associated Press.
DEA agents repeatedly monitored shipments of fentanyl pills — but did not seize them — as federal prosecutors sought to bring bigger criminal cases against traffickers of a synthetic opioid that the White House last year designated a “ weapon of mass destruction.”
Hmmm. Say, who was president between 2023 and 2025? Which party controlled the White House and these agencies, setting policy in regard to both drug interdiction and border security? Three guesses, and one hint: the answer does not rhyme with thump or sound like "Gee, Opie!"
In fact, as people may recall, Donald Trump made fentanyl trafficking a key part of his presidential campaign. Part of that related to getting tough with China, where the precursors are manufactured, but the bigger point Trump made related to border security. He accused Biden and Kamala Harris of allowing fentanyl to flood across the border without any effective policies to stop it, which Biden and later Harris denied.
Now DEA agents are telling reporters that this was not just neglect, but a deliberate approach to poison America in hopes of making headline cases against drug traffickers. However, the DEA did not keep track of the shipments, which meant a lot of that fentanyl hit the streets in US cities during the Biden Regency. "We 100% got people killed," one DEA agent told the AP, while others likened it to another disaster during the Barack Obama administration:
“We poisoned our community to make cases,” DEA Special Agent David Howell told AP in a series of interviews in New Mexico. “Through our own willful blindness, we get to say, ‘We don’t really know what happened to the drugs.’ But we 100% got people killed.” ...
In interviews, several current and former agents likened the decision to permit fentanyl to hit the streets to the infamous “Operation Fast and Furious,” a 2011 gun-walking scandal in which straw buyers smuggled some 2,000 assault weapons into Mexico with the intent of tracing the firearms to cartel leaders.
Howell became concerned enough to file a whistleblower complaint with the US Office of Special Counsel, an agency created to protect whistleblowers and ensure proper investigation into their claims. (This is not the same office as special counsels such as Jack Smith, Robert Hur, Robert Mueller, et al, which are appointed by and operate under the DoJ.) The OSC found Howell's complaints to be substantiated and referred the matter to the DoJ. Merrick Garland's DoJ apparently did nothing:
In early 2024, Howell told the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility that DEA agents had observed — yet not seized — separate deliveries of 150,000 and 50,000 fentanyl pills.
DEA and federal prosecutors, he added, “are placing themselves in a precarious position where they will not be able to prove that the fentanyl they could have stopped did not result in the death of a person.”
The Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility found in 2024 that the DEA and U.S. attorney’s office had made reasonable decisions in deciding to allow drugs to go unseized and that their inaction posed no “specific danger to public health.”
Actually, it's unfair to say that Merrick Garland's DoJ did nothing. They did act ... to punish Howell for blowing the whistle:
Howell, meanwhile, paid a price after coming forward. The DEA relegated him to desk duty for more than a year and docked his performance evaluations, according to Howell and DEA records. Internal records also show prosecutors barred him from testifying in federal court, citing his “pattern of refusing to heed” admonitions to allow drugs to go unseized during long-term investigations.
In other words, the Biden Regency and Merrick Garland punished Howell for actually attempting to stop the flow of fentanyl into the US at the very time, as the AP notes, the White House pushed its "One Pill Can Kill" PR campaign. Taking this slogan at its word, in just those two instances alone, Biden and his team shrugged off 200,000 potential American deaths in exchange for the prospect of indicting a cartel leader. And when Howell spoke up about it through proper channels, they punished Howell for doing his job rather than take these fentanyl shipments off the street. They knew just how deadly this choice would be, too; as the AP also notes, the DEA has set up a special laboratory for dealing with fentanyl seizures, based on the dangers of even casual contact with it.
Biden and Garland didn't care about preventing fentanyl deaths. They just wanted headlines for high-profile indictments. DEA agents knew it, too, and tried to warn people of the risks they were running, only to have Garland shut down accountability.
Trump's election changed all of that. The AP doesn't mention his name either, but as soon as Trump took office, he secured the southern border within weeks and all but declared war on fentanyl trafficking. The US Navy routinely sinks boats trafficking fentanyl and other drugs into the US rather than seizing them; Trump has made fentanyl trafficking a major consideration in trade policy. The mention of 2025 as an end point for Operation Fast and Fentanylious is not a coincidence, even if the AP shies away from the obvious change of direction for fentanyl interdiction that took place in February of that year.
Everyone responsible for punishing Howell should be held accountable for the deaths that followed. That includes Garland and whoever really ran the White House during the Biden Regency.
Editor’s Note: Thanks to President Trump and his administration’s bold leadership, we are respected on the world stage, and our enemies are being put on notice.
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