A few weeks ago, Vice President Mike Pence abruptly canceled a trip to New Hampshire where he was scheduled to attend a roundtable on the opioid crisis — but no one knew why.
Pence’s spokeswoman, Alyssa Farah, went on Twitter to offer a rather mysterious excuse, stating that “something came up” but it was “no cause for alarm.” She quickly added in a follow-up tweet that there was no “emergency call back” and that’s Pence’s plane never even left the ground in Washington. However, Randy Gentry, a representative from the VP’s office completely contradicted Farah’s statement when he claimed that t was, in fact, an “emergency callback” that required the vice president to “return” to DC.
And, of course, Donald Trump himself just had to add his own touch of confusion to the mess when he claimed in a press gaggle, “There was a problem up there and I won’t go into what the problem was, but you’ll see in about a week or two.” That, of course, was no more than a ploy by Trump to make himself look cool.
However, thanks to a new report from Politico, we now know the real reason that Pence stayed his ass in Washington that day — one of the people he was set to meet with was about to be busted for interstate drug trafficking of fentanyl and the White House didn’t want the Vice President to be seen anywhere near him.
Politico reported:
“Among the problems was a federal law enforcement probe involving individuals Pence would likely encounter, according to a law enforcement official briefed on the incident. If Pence stepped off the vice presidential aircraft, one of the people he would have seen on the ground was under investigation by the Drug Enforcement Administration for moving more than $100,000 of fentanyl from Massachusetts to New Hampshire.”
“Federal court documents released Friday said Hatch was caught in 2017 with 1,500 grams of fentanyl. A baggie of the drug sold on the streets of New Hampshire is usually about one-tenth of a gram,” the report continued.
So, it wasn’t a big, secret to-do like Trump wanted you to think it was, after all. It was no more than a big, fat attempt to save face.
Featured image via DC Tribune GalleryÂ
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