See also: Secret Service sacrificing its reputation to protect drug offender in the White House

Sherlock Holmes famously found a clue in the dog that didn’t bark in The Adventure of Silver Blaze. I wonder if we may have a similar clue in the explanation offered by the Secret Service for dropping its investigation into the cocaine found in the White House after only 11 days, with no drug testing of suspects?

In its official announcement that the case is closed and will forever remain a mystery, the Secret Service avers:

The packaging was subjected to advanced fingerprint and DNA analysis. Both of these analyses were conducted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation's crime laboratory given their expertise in this area and independence from the investigation. (snip)

On July 12, the Secret Service received the FBI’s laboratory results, which did not develop latent fingerprints and insufficient DNA was present for investigative comparisons.  

How is it possible to handle a plastic baggie and not leave a fingerprint, or at least a fragment or trace of one?

Was the perp wearing gloves? In early July in sweltering DC? If so, wouldn’t this have been noticed by the many guards and recorded on the video surveillance?  Did the perp stop in front of the cubby or locker (it has been identified as both) and put on rubber gloves like a surgeon preparing for an operation? Or maybe, he or she pulled the package from a pocket using tweezers?

Would someone careless enough to leave a baggie of cocaine in the White House be so ultra-careful in handling it so as to not leave even a partial fingerprint?

This does not make any sense at all.

I hate to do this, but experience has taught me that when dealing with bureaucrats making excuses, it is important to parse the language they use very carefully. Think for a moment about the way that 51 current and former intelligence officials created the impression that they were saying that Hunter Biden’s laptop was Russian disinformation when they wrote that it “had all the signs of Russian disinformation.”  

Now, consider in that same light the statement that “the Secret Service received the FBI’s laboratory results, which did not develop latent fingerprints….”

This language avoids the straightforward claim that no fingerprints were found. The language employed, “did not develop latent fingerprints,” is consistent with the laboratory not performing the steps necessary to discover latent fingerprints. In other words, they did not look for them at all.

It’s a sorry state of affairs when we have to look for tricky language that could be used to deceive us this way. I sincerely hope that such suspicions are absurd.  But we have come to pass where the possibility of such deliberate misleading cannot be dismissed with the wave of a hand.  

Graphic credit: Vector Portal  CC BY 4.0 license

This post has been updated to correct the reference to Sherlock Holmes.