Saunders: Cocaine in White House less a problem than reaction

By Debra J. Saunders / Creators.com

In his memoir “Beautiful Things,” Hunter Biden writes about the time he left his wallet in a rental car where he also left drug paraphernalia and white-powder residue. A Prescott, Arizo., rental car company employee called local police, “who called the Secret Service, who called my dad,” who no longer was the vice president.

Prescott police dropped the charges on their own. Biden writes, “Despite the speculation in the right-wing media to the contrary, the cops weren’t strong-armed into dropping the case.”

Be it noted that, like the public, law enforcement isn’t as gung-ho about prosecuting drug violations as it used to be. The days of draconian federal drug laws — pushed by now-President Joe Biden when he was a young senator — are over.

Ditto when Hunter Biden was discharged from the Navy Reserve after he tested positive for cocaine in 2014.

On July 2, the Secret Service found a Ziploc bag of cocaine in the White House.

Let me stipulate that I do not think the cocaine was left by the president’s son, who apparently has been staying in the White House, although the Biden family spent that weekend at Camp David.

But I couldn’t help but think what Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., tweeted: “Imagine if they had found a bag of cocaine in the Trump White House! That is all every Republican would be asked about by the media & democrats would be demanding Trump & everyone who works for him to take drug tests.”

The timing — one month after Biden’s Department of Justice reached a plea deal that spared Hunter Biden jail time — can’t be good for the administration.

We are at a moment when public trust in federal institutions and journalism giants isn’t what it used to be. The cocaine discovery at 1600 Pennsylvania and the low-energy media reaction to it can’t help.

In 2017, when it was learned that Donald Trump, Jr. had met with Russian attorney Natalia Veselnitskaya in Trump Tower once during the 2016 campaign, the White House press corps went into overdrive pushing the bogus Russian-collusion narrative.

Cocaine found in the Biden White House? What followed were a handful of stories that identified various places where the stash reputedly was found. Then crickets. There was no media feeding frenzy.

In case it wasn’t clear this is no big deal, The Washington Post ran a story on narcotics usage in White Houses past. The story included former Presidents John F. Kennedy and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, even though JFK’s mention included the word “allegedly” and the piece failed to establish that FDR’s doctor prescribed cocaine for FDR.

On Air Force One last week, a reporter asked Deputy Press Secretary Andrew Bates about Trump social media posts that without proof suggested the cocaine could have belonged to POTUS or his son.

Bates responded, “I don’t have a response to that because we have to be careful about the Hatch Act,” which prohibits government workers from doing political work on the job or on government property.

Bates then compared Biden’s record to that of Trump, which sort of undercut his dodge about not wanting to be too partisan.

They’re arrogant because they think they can get away with anything. Make that: They know they can get away with anything.