And here we thought the plague of fentanyl deaths across our nation during the Biden administration was due to fecklessness or incompetence. Occam’s razor and all that, right?

As it turns out, though, malevolence might’ve had something to do with it.

Yesterday, as Just the News reports, we learned that a whistleblower within the Drug Enforcement Administration “has evidence that his agency and federal prosecutors let more than 1 million fentanyl pills flow onto the streets of New Mexico during the Biden era and then tried to silence him from testifying after he blew the whistle.”

Just the News didn’t break this story, though. The Associated Press did. “Staggering amounts of fentanyl hit streets as the DEA watched and took no action,” reads yesterday’s AP’s headline. And then this:

Even as it battled the deadliest drug epidemic in American history, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration permitted hundreds of thousands of fentanyl pills to hit the streets of New Mexico between 2023 and 2025, according to three current and former DEA agents and government records reviewed by The Associated Press.

DEA agents repeatedly monitored shipments of fentanyl pills — but did not seize them — as federal prosecutors sought to bring bigger criminal cases against traffickers of a synthetic opioid that the White House last year designated a “weapon of mass destruction.”

Agents and experts, however, said the tactic amounted to a gamble with public safety that potentially imperiled communities in and around Albuquerque and may have violated U.S. Justice Department rules intended to safeguard the public.

Notice, though, what’s missing from those first few paragraphs of the AP’s story: the word “Biden.” As in, This deadly and stunningly ill-conceived operation was carried out by the Biden administration.

When I began reading the AP’s piece, I just assumed its reporters were doing what they always do — burying the culpability of their fellow-traveling Democrats in paragraph 18 or so, after most folks have already skimmed the piece, gotten the gist, and moved on without necessarily registering who’s to blame.

But no. The story is nearly 1,800 words long, and not one of those words is “Biden.” This is why I refer to that “news” organization as the Appropriated Press.

“We poisoned our community to make cases,” said the whistleblower himself, DEA Special Agent David Howell. “Through our own willful blindness, we get to say, ‘We don’t really know what happened to the drugs.’ But we 100% got people killed.”

Howell, a Navy veteran with 14 years at DEA, “became so unnerved by his agency’s failure to seize fentanyl that he began flagging overdose deaths that might have been caused by the very pills the DEA permitted to flow to dealers,” the AP says. “One of those cases included a 15-month-old toddler who died after ingesting burned fentanyl residue last year in Española, a New Mexico town ravaged by grinding poverty and addiction.”

He then went to the U.S. Office of Special Counsel, which found a “substantial likelihood of wrongdoing” and asked the Merrick Garland-led DOJ to investigate.

But get this: In 2024, the DOJ’s Office of Professional Responsibility tried to cover the Biden administration’s tracks by finding that the DEA and the U.S. attorney’s office “had made reasonable decisions” in allowing the streets of New Mexico to be flooded with deadly fentanyl, “and that their inaction posed no ‘specific danger to public health.’”

So, according to the Biden administration, one million fentanyl pills on the streets of New Mexico posed “no specific danger to public health.” Tell that to the families of the nearly 73,000 Americans who died from fentanyl poisoning in 2023.

But the Biden administration wasn’t content with merely burying Howell’s allegations; it also tried to wreck him personally. As the AP reports — again, without assigning blame to the Biden administration — “The DEA relegated him to desk duty for more than a year and docked his performance evaluations. … Internal records also show prosecutors barred him from testifying in federal court, citing his ‘pattern of refusing to heed’ admonitions to allow drugs to go unseized during long-term investigations.”

Here, I can’t help but be reminded of the “Fast and Furious” gun-walking scandal from the Obama days. Remember when we learned about that reckless operation to sell some 2,000 firearms to straw purchasers in the hope that they could then track the guns to the Mexican drug cartels?

What could go wrong, right? Remember when we learned that the ATF agents who were supposed to be tracking those weapons inexplicably lost them on their way to the cartels, and how that operation thus cost the lives of Border Patrol agent Brian Terry and perhaps that of ICE agent Jaime Zapata, as well as more than 300 Mexican civilians?

And remember when Obama’s wingman, Attorney General Eric Holder, falsely tried to blame it on the previous administration, the Bush administration, and how he then decided to become the first sitting cabinet member in our nation’s history to be held in contempt of Congress rather than coughing up a trove of incriminating documents under subpoena from the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee’s investigation?

Fast and Furious was a deadly Democrat scandal, but this fentanyl scheme might well dwarf it in terms of lives lost.

Howell’s attorney, Tristan Leavitt, said he hopes to see “parallel congressional and DOJ Inspector General investigations” to establish some accountability — both for what happened to his client and for what happened to the as-yet anonymous Americans who were harmed or killed by this idiotic and deeply callous Democrat operation.

We’ll stay tuned. This can’t be swept under the rug.