Comer launches probe into actions by Biden admin's DEA that allowed fentanyl to reach streets

House Oversight Committee Chairman Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., announced an investigation Monday into actions taken by the Biden Administration’s Drug Enforcement Administration that reportedly allowed fentanyl to hit U.S. streets in New Mexico while the agency watched and took no action.

Attorney Tristan Leavitt, president of the Empower Oversight, a whistleblower center, said in an interview with Just the News in June that a DEA agent has evidence that his agency and federal prosecutors let more than 1 million fentanyl pills flow onto the streets of New Mexico during the Biden era and then tried to silence him from testifying after he blew the whistle. 

Leavitt's group represents DEA Special Agent David Howell, a 14-year veteran of the agency whose whistleblower complaint was chronicled by The Associated Press. 

“The true cost of the DEA's fentanyl walking policy in American lives may never be fully known. But transparency into the decision-making that allowed this practice under the Biden administration is not just warranted, it is owed to the families who lost a loved one. Chairman Comer is right to demand answers about how and why this policy was allowed," Tristan Leavitt, Empower Oversight president, said in a statement. 

DEA Administrator Terrance Cole wrote to Assistant Inspector General Sean O'Neill that month to request an independent review of DEA operations in New Mexico that allowed the drugs to flow onto the streets.

The Biden Administration reversed Trump Administration protocols designed to protect public safety, which resulted in more fentanyl related deaths in New Mexico, Comer wrote in a letter sent Monday to U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche.

In November 2019, the Trump Administration’s Department of Justice (DOJ) issued risk mitigation protocols that prioritized addressing the lethality of fentanyl to ensure it did not have an opportunity to harm the public. 

In early 2023, according to the announcement, the Biden Administration’s DEA disregarded these previously established protocols in New Mexico. The DEA instead allowed shipments of up to 100,000 pills to remain in the hands of criminals, resulting in “walking fentanyl,” where the pills were not intercepted and allowed to continue to move through criminal networks, Comer wrote. 

Comer is demanding documents and communications related to the decisions made by the Biden Administration. 

"The Committee on Oversight and Government Reform is investigating the Biden Administration’s relaxation of fentanyl risk mitigation protocols that allegedly disallowed interdictions by law enforcement and permitted deadly street drugs to flow into U.S. communities," Comer said in a statement.