The conclusion of an 11-day Secret Service probe that failed to find which White House staff member or visitorleft cocaine in the West Winglooks like a whitewash, former federal investigators told The Post Thursday.
“This is a cover-up. How can they say they have no leads?” one ex-agent said. “It is a restricted area and they have a log book, you don’t have to be Columbo to figure out who was there.
“Suppose it was anthrax,” the same person raged. “Would they have the same answer?”
“We have a tale of two countries,” another former fed said. “They identified hundreds of people who were in the Capitol building on Jan. 6 after an extensive investigation, but they don’t know who left something in an 8 x 10 room in the White House?”
The Secret Service concluded its inquiry Thursday without identifying a suspect, citing “a lack of physical evidence” after FBI forensic testing yielded no fingerprints and insufficient DNA evidence.
“Without physical evidence, the investigation will not be able to single out a person of interest from the hundreds of individuals who passed through the vestibule where the cocaine was discovered,” the protective agencysaid in a statement.
The cocaine was discovered July 2 by an agent in a storage locker inside the West Wing’s basement entrance — one floor below the Oval Office and just feet from the Situation Room.
Because so much sensitive material passes through the area, no cameras are focused there — and were thus unable to pick up footage of the culprit depositing the white, powdery substance in one of the vestibule’s 182 lockers, a source familiar with the investigation confirmed to The Post.
The cocaine was discovered July 2 by a Secret Service agent in a storage locker inside the West Wing’s basement entrance — one floor below the Oval Office just feet from the Situation Room.Getty Images/iStockphoto
Republicans on the House Oversight Committee who were briefed on the investigation’s findings Thursday morning said less than a gram of cocaine entered the building without being detected and that roughly 500 potential suspects were identified.
The FBI probed hundreds of suspects in the wake of the events of Jan. 6, 2021, with more than 1,000 indicted on federal charges.
But the Secret Service did not pursue any potential suspects in the drug probe, frustrating congressional Republicans.
“They were able to narrow down a list of approximately 500 people that had left a small bag of cocaine,” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) told reporters.Getty Images“You can’t tell me in the White House, with 24/7 surveillance in a cubby hole by a Situation Room that they don’t know who delivered it there,” said House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.).Getty Images
“My question to them was, have they drug-tested this list of 500 potential suspects that brought an illegal substance, or drug, cocaine, into the White House?” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) told reporters. “Their answer was ‘no’ and that they’re unwilling to do so.”
“You can’t tell me in the White House, with 24/7 surveillance, in a cubby hole by the Situation Room that they don’t know who delivered it there,” House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) told Fox News. “We should get an answer to the question. It just seems to me that in America today anything involving Biden Inc. gets treated differently than anything else and that shouldn’t be the case.”
“Every time there’s something strange going on with President Biden or his family, or anything regarding his administration or the White House, no one can ever seem to find an answer,” Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) also said. “This is one of the most secure locations in the world, some of the best law enforcement officers in the world — and they don’t have any answers.”
The cocaine forced a brief evacuation Sunday and a DC Fire and EMS hazmat team descended on the executive mansion to conduct preliminary tests for dangerous substances.AP
The cocaine forced a brief evacuation on the evening of July 2 and a DC Fire and EMS hazmat team descended on the executive mansion to conduct preliminary tests for dangerous substances. An initial test found cocaine, and an FBI lab later confirmed the result.
The president had departed the White House two days earlier to spend the weekend before Independence Day at Camp David — along with first son Hunter Biden, who wrote about his addiction to crack cocaine in his 2021 memoir “Beautiful Things.”
Hunter agreed last month to plead guilty to tax misdemeanors and plans to enter into a diversion program for lying about abusing drugs when purchasing a firearm. Pending a judge’s approval, the first son is expected to avoid jail time and serve two years of probation.
U.S. Commerce Department Secretary Gina Raimondo was among a group of senior U.S. officials whose emails were hacked earlier this year by a group Microsoft says is based in China, according to a person briefed on the matter, as fallout from the digital theft continues to spread.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken made clear to China's top diplomat Wang Yi in a meeting in Jakarta on Thursday that any action that targets the U.S. government, U.S. companies or American citizens "is of deep concern to us, and that we will take appropriate action to hold those responsible accountable," said another source, a senior State Department official.
On Tuesday, Microsoft revealed that a stealthy Chinese hacking operation had exploited a secret flaw in a piece of the company's authentication software in order to covertly break into email accounts belonging to 25 unnamed organizations.
Since the news broke, several victims in addition to the Commerce Department have acknowledged they were affected, including personnel at the State Department and U.S. House of Representatives. The intrusion activity began in May and continued for roughly one month.
The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs called the accusations "disinformation" in a statement to Reuters earlier this week.
Raimondo's department has implemented a series of export control policies against China, curbing the transfer of semiconductors and other sensitive technologies.
A Commerce Department spokesperson said on Wednesday that Microsoft had notified the agency of "a compromise to Microsoft's Office 365 system, and the Department took immediate action to respond." But the spokesperson declined to comment on an intrusion against Raimondo specifically.
A report by the U.S. inspector general's office in March sharply criticized the Commerce Department's "fundamental deficiencies" in its cybersecurity incident response program, saying it violated security procotols, did not properly use cyber-protection tools and poorly handled simulated cyberattacks.
A senior FBI official said on Wednesday that no classified information was taken during the hacking operation. The hacking was highly targeted, accessing only email inboxes and not destroying data.
Across the United States, there’s a growing number of summer camps specifically for children who don’t identify with their biological sex.
These overnight camps connect hundreds of children who identify as transgender, nonbinary, and gender non-conforming.
Attending such camps is likely to create lasting gender dysphoria in children who would otherwise probably leave that phase behind, psychologist Nicholas Kardaras told The Epoch Times.
Dr. Kardaras runs Omega Recovery, a mental health clinic in Austin, Texas.
Most children will grow out of gender dysphoria if not encouraged in it, he said. But when adults encourage a “social contagion,” it will spread rapidly, he said.
“If you put a very developmentally fragile young person in any social group that is very dominant, they’re going to inevitably mimic the behaviors and the identity of that social group that they get dropped in,” Dr. Kardaras told The Epoch Times.
‘Gender-Liberated’ Facilities
Unlike traditional summer camps that require separate bathrooms and sleeping areas for boys and girls, some transgender camps don’t segregate children by gender, The Epoch Times discovered.
In West Central Ohio’s Camp Lilac, restrooms and shower facilities “are split by age group, not gender,” the camp website reads. “Showers are in private stalls with locking doors.”
Vermont’s Camp Outright advertises on its website that “all the bathrooms at camp are gender-liberated.” And campers and counselors self-select which cabin they will stay in, based on their gender identity, according to the website.
Dr. Nicholas Kardaras, executive director of The Dunes addiction recovery center, at The Dunes mansion in East Hampton, N.Y., on March 23, 2017. (Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times)
The Naming Project camp in Deerwood, Minnesota, advertises that separation between men and women isn’t encouraged. The group describes itself as a Christian ministry, and its website, in response to a frequently asked question about its camp for adults, reads: “At other church camps, you might have heard the phrase, ‘Boys are blue. Girls are pink. Don’t make purple.’ Well, we won’t be saying that, because that phrase erases the reality of LGBTQ people, our lives, and our relationships.”
The American Camp Association (ACA) stands behind the emergence of camps especially for transgender-identifying children, according to Andy Pritikin, the director.
“I think that mixed gender is likely going to be the wave of the future,” he said. “I have so many kids that are transgender, so many staff that are transgender, at this point. To have mixed-gender groups makes life a heck of a lot easier for these folks.”
Transgenderism has dramatically changed summer camps, even those not specifically designed to cater only to campers and counselors who identify as transgender, Mr. Pritikin said.
While public schools must abide by government rules on transgender issues, directors of privately run camps decide on their own how to handle those situations, he said.
American Camp Association director Andy Pritikin leads Liberty Lake Day Camp in Bordentown, N.J. (Courtesy of the American Camp Association)
It can be complicated when counselors suddenly announce they’ve “changed genders,” he said.
“I’m hiring staff in, let’s say, March, and then we do our first training [for summer camp], and they’ve changed genders,” he said.
It happens with campers, too, requiring last-minute reorganization, he said.
“We’re enrolling campers as boys. Then, a week before camp starts, the parent calls and says, ‘They want to be in a girls’ group.'”
The fact that his day camp has male and female bathrooms is less than ideal, he said, because the camp should have gender-neutral facilities.
And same-sex changing rooms should be replaced with gender-neutral facilities, Mr. Pritikin said.
At the camp he operates, children go home at the end of the day. The logistical problems of overnight camps are bigger, he said.
Risky Sleeping Arrangements
At sleepaway camps, girls may find themselves in a cabin with a boy who identifies as female, Mr. Pritikin said.
“They would not be changing in front of each other,” he said. “They would have changing stalls.
“They’re not fornicating with each other in the same room,” he added. “They’re sleeping in the same room.”
But Mr. Kardaras is skeptical of sudden cases of gender dysphoria that cause last-minute logistical problems for camps.
In genuine cases of gender dysphoria, adults and children don’t suddenly identify as transgender, he said.
“Gender dysphoria doesn’t work like that,” he said. “It’s not authentic gender dysphoria. It would be what I’m calling ‘pseudo-gender dysphoria.'”
He said that this pseudo-gender dysphoria results from online exposure that persuades adults and children that they are transgender.
If camp directors allow children and adults to change accommodations based on these categories, it will cause problems, Mr. Kardaras said.
Mixing genders at camps creates the potential for underage sex, he warned.
Research shows that gender identity is often more changeable than sexual attraction, he said. The girl in the boy’s cabin might still feel attracted to boys, even if she now identifies as male.
“The young person actually may think that they are authentically gender dysphoric, but they’re not. And then when they wind up landing in the girls’ cabin, their sexual orientation unfolds,” he said.
Adolescent boys also might want to sleep in girls’ cabins in search of sex, he said.
Although camps have always had to tackle problems such as these, creating sleeping arrangements to accommodate transgender-identifying campers is “exacerbating the issue,” Mr. Kardaras said.
Children at Camp Liberty Lake in Bordentown, N.J., play while wearing Star Wars masks on June 27, 2018. (Courtesy of Andy Pritikin)
Some people have expressed opposition to the ACA’s “new thinking” about transgenderism, Mr. Pritikin said. But, he added, the media often inflate concerns over transgender “predators in the bathrooms.”
“The concern that I hear from my colleagues is from the parents,” Mr. Pritikin said.
Camp directors have mixed responses to a politically divided public, he said.
Some directors don’t let transgender-identifying campers enroll. Others don’t let in children who won’t sleep in the same room with transgender-identifying campers.
Some shuffle camp arrangements to ensure everyone feels comfortable, he said.
“Half the country voted for Donald Trump, right?” Mr. Pritikin asked. “So I mean, 30 to 40 percent of Americans would have a problem with [accommodating transgender-identifying children and counselors]. So you run the risk of losing some of those people.”
Both overnight and daytime summer camps must be careful to protect children from sexual abuse, he said.
“If any situation comes up where you [as an adult] could theoretically find yourself alone with a camper, you need to invoke the Rule of Three, which is you need to get another staff person or another camper to be with you,” Mr. Pritikin said.
Most sleepaway camps fire anyone who breaks this rule for any reason, he said.
Because predators go wherever children go, Mr. Pritikin said he encourages camp officials to stay on high alert.
“Everybody is suspect,” he said. “You’re choosing to work your summer with kids, and that’s great. That’s noble. That’s amazing.
“But at the same time, our whole staff has to keep the radar up on everybody.”
Dangerous Policies?
It’s shocking and dangerous that sex-based boundaries that have kept children safe have been removed at some camps, Kimberly Fletcher, president and founder of Moms for America, told The Epoch Times.
“When you open Pandora’s box, you don’t get to decide what comes out,” Ms. Fletcher said.
She said that she experienced sexual abuse as a young girl and that spaces that allow men and women to sleep in the same cabin or use the same bathrooms feel unsafe and threatening to her.
Mixed-gender camp arrangements create openings for sexual abuse, discomfort, and legal trouble, she said.
“I don’t want my daughters being put in a position where they feel uncomfortable as girls,” Ms. Fletcher said. “And as a mother of sons, that puts them in a position to have all kinds of legal action and problems that could come out after them.
“There are sex offender laws out there that go after young boys for doing things that [camps are] encouraging them to do.”
Camps that encourage children in transgenderism would likely fail to notice how often children make sweeping claims about their identities that have little to no basis in reality, Ms. Fletcher said.
Embracing these claims or letting them pass unchallenged invites madness, she said.
Saudi Arabia will lose its status as the largest OPEC+ oil producer to Russia as it begins the unilateral cut of 1 million barrels per day (bpd), with the Kingdom pledging to pump around 9 million bpd in July and August—the lowest level in two years.
Excluding the deep cuts during the pandemic, a Saudi production of just around 9 million bpd would be the lowest level the world’s top crude oil exporter has pumped since 2011.
“The Kingdom’s crude output is set to plunge to a two-year low of around 9 mb/d in July and August, leaving it trailing behind Russia as the bloc’s top crude producer,” the International Energy Agency (IEA) said in its Oil Market Report on Thursday.
In a bid to push oil prices higher, or “stabilize the market” as Saudi Arabia and OPEC put it, the Kingdom announced last month a unilateral cut of 1 million bpd to its production levels for July, while the OPEC+ producers who had pledged cuts between May and December extended those cuts into 2024. Last week, Saudi Arabia said it would extend its unilateral production cut into August, and will be producing around 9 million bpd in both July and August.
“This additional voluntary cut comes to reinforce the precautionary efforts made by OPEC Plus countries with the aim of supporting the stability and balance of oil market,” Saudi Arabia said on July 3.
Minutes after the Saudi announcement, Russia’s Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak said that Russia would cut its crude oil exports by 500,000 bpd in August in a bid to ensure a balanced market. However, the top oil official in Russia and lead OPEC+ negotiator, didn’t give any figures as to the volume of the Russian production and exports for August, nor the baseline from which the cut would be made.
The August cut in exports would mean an additional cut in oil production by 500,000 bpd in August, Novak’s office told Russian daily Vedomosti.
The number of American children that have been diagnosed with developmental disabilities has increased, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported.
The agency unveiled new findings Thursday showing that nearly one in 10 children in the US were diagnosed with a developmental disability in 2021, an increase from previous years.
Specifically, the prevalence in children aged 3 to 17 grew from 7.4% in 2019 to 8.6% in 2021, according to data from the National Health Interview Survey, which monitors the nation’s health through household questionnaires.
Survey findings were broken down into four categories: any developmental disability, intellectual disability, autism spectrum disorder and other developmental delay.
While the percentage of children diagnosed with an intellectual disability or autism spectrum disorder remained relatively stagnant, the agency saw an uptick in “other developmental delays” from 5.1% in 2018 to 6.1% in 2021.
“A lot of times developmental delays might be temporary diagnoses that evolve into something like autism, potentially, or intellectual disability. But also a lot of times children do age out of those,” Benjamin Zablotsky, a statistician for the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics and the report’s lead author, toldCBS News.
According to the report, the prevalence of developmental delays decreased as children aged, while the diagnosis of intellectual disabilities increased.
Additionally, boys were more likely than girls to be diagnosed with any developmental disability — 10.8% compared to 5.3% — and specifically were an estimated three times more likely to develop autism spectrum disorder.
Past studies have shown that cases of autism spectrum disorder have been climbing.Stephen Yang
When broken down by race, Asian children were the least likely to be diagnosed with any developmental disability (4.9%), compared to Hispanic children (7.4%), black children (9.1%) and white children (8.4%).
“We’re interested in understanding the prevalence of these conditions in the population so that we can make sure we have adequate services available for families and children who need them,” Zablotsky said.
Researchers from Rutgers claimed that rates tripled over the course of 16 years, from 1% in 2000 to 3% in 2016.
Autism spectrum disorder, also known as ASD, affects people socially, behaviorally and verbally. While it is typically diagnosed in young children, some people do not receive an accurate diagnosis until they’re much older due to how difficult the disorder is to identify.
But the rising rates of overall developmental disability diagnosis might not necessarily be as daunting as it seems, according to Maureen Durkin, the Population Health Sciences chair at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
She suspects there has been a historic “under-identifying” of disorders like autism, she told CBS News.
“In that sense, it could be a sign of progress, and a good thing. But it still opens up an entire agenda of things we need to do to prevent disability and improve outcomes overall,” Durkin said.
Surgeons in Israel performed a miracle surgery and managed to reattach a boy’s head after he was hit by a car while riding his bike, the Jerusalem hospital announced this week.
Suleiman Hassan, a 12-year-old Palestinian from the West Bank, suffered what is known as an internal decapitation, with his skull detached from the top vertebrae of his spine – officially known as a bilateral atlanto occipital joint dislocation, according to The Times of Israel.
He was riding his bike when a car hit him. The boy was rushed to Hadassah Medical Center and immediately put him into surgery in the trauma unit.
The doctors said his head was “almost completely detached from the base of his neck.”
Dr. Ohad Einav, the orthopedic specialist who led the operation, said the procedure took several hours and required the doctors to use “new plates and fixations in the damaged area.”
“Our ability to save the child was thanks to our knowledge and the most innovative technology in the operating room,” Einav said, adding that the team “fought for the boy’s life.”
Einav and his team said that Hassan has a projected survival rate of only 50%, and his recovery is nothing short of a miracle, according to i24 News.
Suleiman Hassan’s head was “almost completely detached from the base of his neck.”Hadassah Medical Center
The operation occurred in June, but doctors waited a month to announce the results.
The hospital recently discharged Hassan with a cervical splint and will continue to monitor his recovery.
“The fact that such a child has no neurological deficits or sensory or motor dysfunction and that he is functioning normally and walking without an aid after such a long process is no small thing,” Einav said.
According to Israel’s TPS news agency, Hassan’s father did not leave his son’s bedside during the recovery process, saying he had nothing but a “big thank you” for the medical staff.
“Bless you all,” the father said. “Thanks to you, he regained his life even when the odds were low and the danger was obvious.”
“What saved him were professionalism, technology and quick decision-making by the trauma and orthopedics team,” TPS reported the father as saying.
Dr. Marc Siegel, Clinical Professor of Medicine and a practicing internist at NYU Langone Medical Center and Fox News contributor, told Fox News Digital that the “amazing” surgery was only possible if major blood vessels remained intact.
“The key is preserving blood flow to the brain,” Siegel said. “It sounds like – from the story – that the major blood vessels were likely not severed and that this involved an orthopedic rebuilding – probably using rods and reattaching ligaments and possibly bone grafts and implants.”
Einav stressed that the surgery is “extremely rare,” but the large size of a child’s head relative to an adult means they are “more susceptible.”
“This is not a common surgery at all, and especially not on children and teens. A surgeon needs knowledge and experience to do this,” he said.
