All things considered, the bag of cocaine found in the West Wing last month could have produced a lot more weirdness in America’s febrile and conspiracy-addled media. The New York Post piece yesterday seems positively restrained. The Post reported that the bandito blanco in question may have belonged to someone in the “Biden family orbit” — not his son Hunter, the piece specifies — and the president allegedly knows who it is.
Following up on a “shocking claim” in Soldier of Fortune (the online resurrection of the long-running “Journal of Professional Adventurers”), the Post cites “three security sources” Fortune publisher Susan Katz Keating apparently spoke to, one of whom anonymously told her: “If you want the name, ask Joe Biden. He knows who it is.”
The piece does make it clear they have not been able to verify Keating’s claim, but points out that she went so far as to text a “number linked to President Biden in a bid to sniff out the culprit”. The Post tries the number too, and shares the result:
So the Post apparently texted a media query to Biden and got back what looks suspiciously like the kind of automatically generated response favoured by government chatbots and scammers. Undeterred, the Post demands: “Did the Secret Service inform you on the identity of WH cocaine culprit?” Apparently this isn’t answered.
So what combination of investigative reporting and source cultivation delivered Biden’s digits to Keating and the Post? They might have gone to the homepage of messaging platform community.com and scrolled to “Joe Biden”. Or checked Biden’s X account. Or his Facebook. Or the bio on his Instagram.
Yep, the number “associated with Biden” that Keating tracked down is the widely, widely, so very widely shared number that Biden released to solicit feedback from his constituents in July last year:
The administration on Saturday unveiled a phone number, (302) 404-0880 (Delaware-based, obviously), through the platform and will ask people to share personal stories about how gun violence has changed their lives. The president will relay some of those stories during a White House event Monday highlighting the gun safety legislation he signed into law earlier this month.
We’d bet that not even the most one-eyed Democrat partisan expected that Biden himself was at the other end of that line.
