Former Secret Service agent Melanie Burkholder and former FBI agent Jonathan Gilliam told Newsmax on Thursday that, at best, the incident where cocaine was found at the White House makes the Secret Service look incompetent and, at worst, looks like "a drug deal gone bad."
"I believe this administration is sadly somewhat desensitized to the idea that there can be cocaine in America's Home and that it's not a big deal," Burkholder said during an appearance on Newsmax's "American Agenda."
"They already are laying shade about where it was found and who has access to the entrances and what the implications are to those accesses. Well, if they have fingerprints, it's a very simple process, right? They, I believe, already know the perpetrator in this crime, and I also think it looks a lot like a drug deal gone bad.
"Secret Service should be looking at this with an investigator's eye and following the who, what, when, and where, and why," she said. "Who has the audacity to bring a Class II substance into the People's House and plant it somewhere? I'm telling you, it looks like a drug drop that just went bad. And how many times has this happened before?"
Gilliam agreed that discovering the identity of the person who brought the drug into the White House shouldn't be beyond the capabilities of the Secret Service.
"It's not like we're talking about a major event, at the Super Bowl, or some type of event like that, where 70,000 people were coming in," he said. "We're talking about a small group of people that have had access at that period of time in a confined space that is probably the most guarded location in the United States.
"So, if the Secret Service is not capable of finding out who carried any of that stuff into the White House, then we need to start asking real questions about who's running the Secret Service, what their investigative capabilities and protective capabilities actually are, because this is a complete failure, as far as protecting, not just the president, but America's House."
Both former federal agents raised the specter of a chemical attack being carried out at the White House in the same manner.
"What, perhaps, if it [the cocaine] had been something more serious, something that's not detectable by magnetometers?" Burkholder asked. "That's the potential harm that we have, not only to the White House, but to the administration and the Secret Service agents that are there guarding it."
"Let's say this was a small amount of anthrax," Gilliam said. "That's enough anthrax to kill several people in that area within that confined space. The Secret Service is, in essence, telling us that, if it was anthrax or any other type of volatile powdered substance, they're not going to be able to find out who brought it in. And that is a scary, scary thought."
Gilliam also said that White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre "has a tell like the worst poker player in the world."
"When she starts blinking her eyes quickly, she is either lying or she is trying to develop some type of a story to cover something up," he said. "That's an honest investigative insight because, when I watch her, and she's just talking about something in general, there's no blinking. It's as soon as she starts trying to tiptoe around something or lie, she starts blinking 90 miles an hour."
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