On the menu today: If getting started this morning after the Independence Day weekend was tough, don’t blame me. I’ve argued July 5 should be a national holiday for a long time. We return with the news that white powder was found in the White House while the president was away at Camp David — and, fairly or not, many people have reacted by assuming that Hunter Biden has fallen back into his old habits.
White Powder in the White House
When you write in your memoir that for a stretch you were “smoking crack every 15 minutes,” and then cocaine is found in your father’s house, suspicious eyes will turn toward you. And when your father’s house is the White House, and the discovery of the cocaine prompts an evacuation of the building, it stops being anything resembling a private matter.
Could it be someone else who brought cocaine into the White House? Sure. A spokesman for the Secret Service, Anthony Guglielmi, said the white powder was found in a “work area of the West Wing.” A senior law-enforcement official told CBS News the substance was found “in a storage facility in a cubby routinely used by White House staff and guests to store cell phones.”
But White House staffers are not known to be notorious drug users. All of them go through background checks, a lot of them have security clearances, and under federal law, using drugs, particularly a “hard drug” such as cocaine, would trigger an automatic revocation of your security clearance and be grounds for immediate termination. (If you want to work for the U.S. Secret Service, you cannot have used or purchased “hard drugs” in the past ten years.) If a White House staffer were to bring cocaine into their workplace, it would represent taking an extraordinary gamble. The U.S. Secret Service has K-9 units trained to detect “drugs, explosives, and firearms.” Everyone and everything that enters the White House is, at minimum, searched with a magnetometer.
Then again, addicts aren’t known for their good judgment and solid risk-assessment skills.
The BBC noted that Secret Service agents found the suspicious powder “in an area that is accessible to tour groups while doing a routine inspection.” But there’s quite a bit of rigamarole in getting a White House tour these days — requests for tours must be submitted well in advance through a nember of Congress and the office’s congressional-tour coordinator. Bringing cocaine into the White House while on an official tour and then leaving it somewhere in the West Wing would require extraordinary nerve and/or stupidity. Then again, we know we live in an era when a social-media influencer felt compelled to go topless during a White House event, so the phrase, “No one would be dumb enough to do that” was officially retired some years ago.
There is also a strange history of celebrities telling stories of doing drugs while visiting the White House.
Hip-hop star Snoop Dogg claimed he smoked marijuana in a White House bathroom in December 2013. Willie Nelson says he rolled and smoked a joint at the White House during the Carter administration; back in 2020, former president Jimmy Carter “revealed that his son Chip was the one who actually smoked ‘a big fat Austin torpedo’ with Willie Nelson on the roof of the White House in 1980.” Other claims include Jefferson Airplane’s Grace Slick attempting to “spike Richard Nixon’s tea with acid” and former Villanova Wildcat Gary McLain claiming he was high on cocaine while meeting Ronald Reagan at a White House ceremony in 1985.
Back in 1996, retired FBI agent Gary Aldrich wrote Unlimited Access: An FBI Agent Inside the Clinton White House, which portrayed the Clinton White House as a debauched bacchanalia that included crack pipes used as Christmas tree ornaments.
Hopefully, Hunter Biden is in a better place psychologically, physically, and emotionally right now than his spectacularly reckless and self-destructive behavior in the not-too-distant past. But to settle the potential gun charge from the Delaware U.S. Attorney, Biden agreed to “to enter a Pretrial Diversion Agreement with respect to the firearm Information” which is a tool often used with nonviolent defendants with substance-abuse problems. Biden simultaneously pled guilty to tax evasion and just settled a messy legal battle about child support, in which he “agreed to financially support his four-year-old daughter but succeeded in his effort to deprive the child of his last name.” It is fair to wonder how well any addict could resist temptation with the stress of recent events such as these.
We don’t know for certain if, as the New York Post’s Miranda Devine reported, “Hunter has been living at the White House with his second wife, Melissa Cohen, and their 3-year-old son, Beau, allegedly to avoid being served with legal papers.” But at minimum, as the New York Times reported, Hunter Biden “often appears at White House events.” Names of Biden family members do not appear in White House visitor logs. And just last week, NBC News reported that President Biden is concerned about his son falling back into self-destructive habits:
But the public displays of parental support, to the dismay of some Democrats, aren’t just about a loving father or a stubborn president’s defiance. For Biden, keeping his son — a recovering drug addict — close means keeping him safe, people close to the president say. Behind the Hunter Biden photo-ops and the state dinner invitations, they say, is an existential concern that weighs on the president daily: If he loosens his grip on his son, who or what will replace it — and to what end?
“It’s consumed him,” a person close to the president said.
If everyone who knows Hunter Biden personally is worried about him relapsing and doing drugs again, you can’t begrudge the rest of the public for thinking of the president’s son when cocaine is found within the White House.
Why does this matter? According to the National Center for Drug Abuse, about 225,000 Americans are arrested annually for the possession of heroin, cocaine, and derivative products. Possession of any amount of cocaine is a crime at both the local and federal levels, with sentences going up to a year in prison.
If, as Hunter Biden claimed, he was doing crack every 15 minutes, he must have nearly constantly been in possession of the substance and yet in all that time, he never once encountered law enforcement. We have this odd situation of a top government official’s son who, in his own description, was constantly doing drugs, and regularly around law-enforcement agents with drug-sniffing dogs, who somehow never got caught. Remarkable luck! He did, however, get kicked out of the U.S. Navy after testing positive for cocaine in 2014, “barely a year after he was selected for the part-time position as a public affairs officer in the Navy Reserve.”
For further irony, then-senator Joe Biden was one of the principal authors of the tough drug laws of the 1990s, including a rule that “treated crack cocaine as significantly worse than powder cocaine and ended up disproportionately punishing African Americans.” That disparity has been partially mitigated but not eliminated; back in 2010, Congress passed and Obama signed the Fair Sentencing Act, which reduced the crack- and powder-cocaine sentencing disparity from 100 to one to 18 to one. Yes, Biden has supported ending those sentencing disparities entirely, but they’re still in place.
In other words, for at least 15 years, Hunter Biden used illegal drugs — including the more illegal form of cocaine — and somehow evaded any legal consequence other than a discharge from the Navy. As Time magazine described Hunter’s memoir:
There are countless visits to rehab. There are searches for crack in Nashville. There’s the 14-day bender during which he flipped one rental car and left his brother’s AG badge and a bunch of drugs in another. He learns to cook his own crack — and he does so — at Chateau Marmont, one of the many LA hotels that lost patience with Hunter’s party-loving entourage and suddenly didn’t have availability. He chases a probably hallucinated barn owl through the California desert. Hunter Biden has escaped what he calls “the Four Housemen of the Crackocalypse,” and he is here to tell us about it.
Almost any other American who didn’t have a father as vice president or future president would have faced criminal charges at some point if they behaved the way Hunter did. The View hostess Ana Navarro is free to look at the tale of Hunter Biden and conclude it’s really “the story of a father’s love.” But it’s also easy to see a story of wealth, privilege, and political connections protecting a deeply troubled man from the consequences of his actions, only enabling further addiction and even more reckless decisions. Hunter Biden seems to have an endless appetite for dumb risks, recording himself smoking crack behind the wheel and speeding 172 miles per hour in a Porsche in 2018.
For a long time, our society has treated different groups using illegal drugs dramatically differently. If you’re white and privileged, you have an addiction problem and need treatment and sympathy. If you’re black and underprivileged, you’re a crackhead and need to be sent to jail.
We see it even in the celebrity examples above. Snoop Dogg has turned into this oddly warm-and-fuzzy, corporate-America-approved national spokesman for marijuana use (language warning for that scene from the reboot of Starsky and Hutch), despite hanging around dangerous convicted felons like, er, Martha Stewart. (Those hip-hop icons of the 1990s sure evolved, didn’t they? Snoop Dogg hangs around with America’s favorite homemaker, Ice Cube ended up making family-road-trip comedies, and Ice T, once best known for “Cop Killer,” ended up playing an NYPD detective for 23 years. Middle age comes for us all, gentlemen.)
But Snoop Dogg and other hip-hop stars were and are often labeled “thugs,” portrayed as dangerous and menaces to society. Meanwhile, good old lovable Willie Nelson is a “rebel.” Few other Americans could forget to pay $16 million in taxes and have no real damage to their reputation.
Any family that faces a loved one’s addiction struggles with figuring out where sympathy for the addict turns into enabling the addict. Maybe that wasn’t Hunter Biden’s cocaine in the White House. But neither he nor the president can begrudge anyone else for suspecting he would do something as reckless, stupid, and illegal as that.
ADDENDUM: As alluded to above, yes, this is my birthday, and yes, middle age comes for us all. If you feel like getting me something, maybe one of my books would make some good summer reading.