Former Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle and others in top agency leadership positions wanted to destroy the cocaine discovered in the White House last summer, but the Secret Service Forensics Services Division and the Uniformed Division stood firm and rejected the push to dispose of the evidence, according to three sources in the Secret Service community.
At least one Uniformed Division officer was initially assigned to investigate the cocaine incident. But after he told his supervisors, including Cheatle and Acting Secret Service Director Ron Rowe, who was deputy director at the time, that he wanted to follow a certain crime-scene investigative protocol, he was taken off the case, according to a source within the Secret Service community familiar with the circumstances of his removal.
Secret Service spokesman Anthony Guglielmi did not immediately return RCP’s request for comment.
(…) Over the last month as the agency has come under fire for a series of mistakes leading to an assassination attempt against Trump, Guglielmi has been forced to correct a previous press statement that the agency did not deny repeated requests for additional security assets from the former president’s staff in the months leading up to the assassination attempt.
It’s unclear exactly when Cheatle and other top officials tried to persuade the Forensics Services Division to destroy the evidence. At some point during the investigation, Matt White, the vault supervisor, received a call from Cheatle or someone speaking on her behalf asking him to destroy the bag of cocaine because agency leaders wanted to close the case, according to two sources in the Secret Service community.
“Protocol is, whether you act on the [DNA] hit or not, we still have to maintain evidence for a period of up to seven years,” a source told RCP. “It became a big to-do.”
White’s boss, Glenn Dennis, the head of the Forensics Services Division, then conferred with the Uniformed Division, which first discovered the cocaine.
“A decision was made not to get rid of the evidence, and it really pissed off Cheatle,” a source in the Secret Service community said in an interview.
At the time of the cocaine’s discovery, Richard Macauley was serving as the acting chief of the Uniformed Division after the recent retirement of Alfonso Dyson Sr., a 29-year veteran of the agency. When Dyson left his position, Macauley, who is black, became the acting director. Despite Cheatle’s push to hire and promote minority men and women, Macauley was passed over for the job of Uniformed Division chief in what many in the agency view as an act of retaliation for supporting those who refused to dispose of the cocaine, according to several sources in the Secret Service community.
In 2018, Macauley was named the Secret Services Uniformed Division Officer of the Year. In an interview with Federal News Network, a news talk show focused on issues of interest to federal government workers, a host lauded Macauley for receiving the award and credited him with tightening operations, increasing diversity, boosting officer training, and improving working conditions, “all while taking care of his own shift operations.” Macauley would go on to serve one year, from February 2022 to January 2023, as deputy assistant sergeant at arms at the U.S. House of Representatives. (Read more: RealClearPolitics, 8/05/2024) (Archive)