{"id":97224,"date":"2026-07-10T20:42:06","date_gmt":"2026-07-10T20:42:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/fallsurfing.net\/firstnews\/on-background-podcast-the-human-cost-of-gathering-intelligence-in-the-fight-against-fentanyl\/"},"modified":"2026-07-10T20:42:06","modified_gmt":"2026-07-10T20:42:06","slug":"on-background-podcast-the-human-cost-of-gathering-intelligence-in-the-fight-against-fentanyl","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fallsurfing.net\/firstnews\/on-background-podcast-the-human-cost-of-gathering-intelligence-in-the-fight-against-fentanyl\/","title":{"rendered":"On Background Podcast: The Human Cost of Gathering Intelligence in the Fight Against Fentanyl"},"content":{"rendered":"

Echoing the Operation Fast and Furious scandal of the Obama administration, the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) during both the Biden and Trump presidencies allowed millions of deadly fentanyl pills to cross into the United States from Mexico without interdicting them. When one DEA agent interdicted a shipment bound for Albuquerque, New Mexico, his own government punished him for it. DEA Special Agent David Howell filed an official whistleblower complaint in 2023 to bring attention to what he believed to be a tactical decision that risked public safety. The Associated Press reported<\/a> in June that between 2023 and 2025, the DEA permitted fentanyl pills to reach the streets of New Mexico, citing three current and former DEA agents and government records it reviewed. The case has eerie parallels to the Fast and Furious operation during the Obama administration. In 2015, the Justice Department under Attorney General Eric Holder allowed an operation that shipped weapons from the US to Mexican cartel buyers as an intelligence effort to track where the weapons ended up. The policy was exposed and became a huge scandal after a US Border Patrol agent was murdered using one of those weapons. It is pretty sickening, says Tristan Leavitt, whistleblower Howell’s attorney. A decade and a half since the Fast and Furious debacle, another misbegotten scheme recklessly put public safety at risk, Leavitt tells host Susan Crabtree on the latest episode of the Drill Down podcast. We’d hoped the Justice Department had learned its lesson. Leavitt walks through how in 2019, during the first Trump administration, the policy at the Justice Department was to whenever practicable seize fentanyl shipments when detected through undercover work. This policy, however, was gutted during the Biden years on the rationale that in the long run, more lives would be saved by not revealing that a fentanyl distribution ring had been monitored. The human cost of that decision in New Mexico, Susan Crabtree notes, is that even as fentanyl deaths nationwide have plummeted since the Trump administration returned to office in 2025, fentanyl deaths in New Mexico spiked by 21 percent. “Really, this broke down on two levels, first in New Mexico, and then as an official policy of the Biden Justice Department. In New Mexico, the office of then U.S. attorney Alex Ubaez, appointed under President Biden, were really the ones pushing to not be seizing these shipments, Leavitt tells Crabtree. Special Agent Howell’s experience started when he had a case where they did seize the fentanyl and then learned that the US Attorney’s Office was upset with them, inexplicably. It was a case where they had a wire (eavesdropping on communications), Leavitt says. It was about being afraid that it would burn the wire. At that point they were seizing fentanyl that had already been sold and is going further downstream. Howell was sidelined at DEA and blocked from testifying after he raised concerns, but a second DEA whistleblower has since come forward, describing a separate case where the same tactic let millions more pills hit the street. Crabtree, who reports for RealClearPolitics and is also a Distinguished Fellow of the Government Accountability Institute, asks whether the Biden administration’s open-border policy and China, which exports the precursor chemicals and supplies to the Mexican drug cartels, are also to blame. It would be difficult to imagine that it didn’t fuel the spread of fentanyl in the country, Leavitt says. It was so much easier for people to get into the country during the Biden administration so, of course, it’s going to be easier for them to bring cargo — illicit fentanyl. On the one hand, I I’m very sympathetic to the complaints of public officials in New Mexico who have been saying, ‘Hey, we’re not your petri dish. We are not an experimental lab for you just to try out these techniques.’ Leavitt also reference GAI president Peter Schweizer’s 2024 bestseller Blood Money, which among other things exposed the deep involvement of the Chinese regime in manufacturing the precursor chemicals, the pill presses, and laundering the drug money made by the Mexican drug cartels through the fentanyl trade. Still, Leavitt is frustrated that since Trump returned to office, little has been done to enforce the previous policy requiring agents to seize shipments when they can or to allow Special Agent Howell to return to drug-interdicting duty. He’s received no indication that the US Attorney’s Office would still allow him to work cases, so that’s really going to be a central focus of ours in the coming weeks — undoing that retaliation, Leavitt says. I think the American people would really be surprised, and they should be, about this story, Crabtree agrees. Leavitt adds that congressional oversight committees have begun making inquiries. He does not blame the political appointees in the Trump administration, but instead believes when you’re dealing with old, outdated, bureaucratic government policies, they’re going back to their old tried-and-true standard at the US attorney’s office they have used to bring cocaine and heroin cases. But those aren’t as deadly.
\nRealClearPolitics Videos<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Echoing the Operation Fast and Furious scandal of the Obama administration, the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) during both the Biden and Trump presidencies allowed millions of deadly fentanyl pills to cross into the United States from Mexico without interdicting them. When one DEA agent interdicted a shipment bound for Albuquerque, New Mexico, his own […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[137,8335,49,6584,165,13309,277,4158,14433],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fallsurfing.net\/firstnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97224"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fallsurfing.net\/firstnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fallsurfing.net\/firstnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fallsurfing.net\/firstnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fallsurfing.net\/firstnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=97224"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/fallsurfing.net\/firstnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97224\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fallsurfing.net\/firstnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=97224"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fallsurfing.net\/firstnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=97224"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fallsurfing.net\/firstnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=97224"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}