Merrick Garland ran a "One Pill Can Kill" campaign while his own agents watched 1.8 million fentanyl pills hit American streets.
A DEA whistleblower just went public with the documents.
The agent who tried to stop it went through proper channels – and Garland's Justice Department tried to bury the truth.
Biden Fentanyl Policy Sent 1.8 Million Pills to American Streets
DEA Special Agent David Howell was 19 years into his career when his own agency crossed a line he couldn’t ignore.
In June 2023, Howell and fellow agents surveilled a fentanyl transaction at an Albuquerque mobile home park in real time – decoding encrypted phone calls, watching the exchange unfold, confirming 74,000 pills changed hands.
They wrote it all down in a 66-page report and drove away.
"We did nothing, but sit back and watch," Howell told the Associated Press.
That was not an isolated incident.
Howell's whistleblower complaint documented at least 1.8 million fentanyl pills his agency monitored but deliberately chose not to seize – all between 2023 and 2025, all on Biden's watch.
Agents also watched a separate 100,000-pill transaction and stood down.
Garland's Justice Department rewrote its internal rules during this same period to give agents more discretion on whether to seize fentanyl – quietly expanding the policy while Howell was raising alarms about it.
This was not negligence.
Biden's DEA called it strategy.
Fentanyl Overdose Deaths Piled Up While Garland Called the Policy Reasonable
The official justification was "bigger fish" – let the drugs walk and build a case against the cartel leadership.
It is the same logic the ATF used for Operation Fast and Furious in 2011, when 2,000 weapons were walked into Mexico to trace them to cartel leaders.
Two of those guns later turned up at the murder scene of a Border Patrol agent.
Howell watched overdose deaths pile up in Española, New Mexico – a small town hollowed out by addiction – and began flagging cases he believed were connected to the pills his agency had deliberately released.
One of those cases was a 15-month-old toddler who died after ingesting burned fentanyl residue.
When Howell escalated his concerns through proper channels, the Office of Special Counsel found a "substantial likelihood of wrongdoing" and referred the matter to Garland's Justice Department for investigation.
Garland's Office of Professional Responsibility concluded in 2024 that the DEA had made "reasonable decisions" and that the inaction posed no "specific danger to public health."
A toddler was dead.
Garland called it reasonable.
DEA Whistleblower David Howell Reported the Crisis and Got Sent to a Desk
Howell pointed out the contradiction between the "One Pill Can Kill" campaign and the pills his agency had knowingly released.
The DEA pulled him from fieldwork and assigned him to a desk for more than a year.
His performance evaluations were docked.
Federal prosecutors barred him from testifying in court – citing his "pattern of refusing to heed" orders to let drug shipments go unseized.
Garland's Justice Department punished Howell for doing his job.
The investigation Howell's agency sacrificed those 1.8 million pills to build eventually culminated in May 2025 – when then-Attorney General Pam Bondi announced the largest fentanyl bust in DEA history, seizing more than 3 million pills.
"The amount we ultimately seized was hitting the streets every month while that case was going on," a former DEA supervisor told AP, adding the organization could have been dismantled six months earlier.
Biden and Garland traded American lives for a press conference.
Trump took office, locked the southern border within weeks, and declared war on fentanyl trafficking – the Navy now intercepts and destroys drug boats rather than watching them sail past.
New Mexico's overdose deaths spiked 21% last year even as national numbers dropped 14%.
The Fast and Furious playbook got a Border Patrol agent killed in 2011 and nobody went to prison for it.
Biden ran the same play with fentanyl – a drug so lethal that two milligrams kills the average adult – and Garland made sure the one agent who tried to stop it paid the price instead.
Every person responsible for sidelining David Howell needs to answer for the deaths that followed.
Sources:
- Jim Mustian and Joshua Goodman, "Staggering amounts of fentanyl hit streets as the DEA watched and took no action, records show," The Washington Times, June 22, 2026.
- "What a reporter found when uncovering why federal agents allowed a deadly drug to hit the streets," Associated Press, June 22, 2026.
- Ed Morrissey, "We 100% Got People Killed: Biden-Era DEA Allowed Staggering Amounts of Fentanyl Into US," HotAir, June 22, 2026.
