Obama's Justice Department let guns walk into Mexico and got a Border Patrol agent killed.
Biden's DOJ read that case file and saw an instruction manual.
Now a governor from Biden's own party wants to know if her state's overdose deaths are actually a federal crime scene.
Biden DOJ Fentanyl Walking Scandal Hits Albuquerque
DEA Special Agent David Howell filed a whistleblower complaint in 2023 after watching fellow agents surveil a fentanyl deal at an Albuquerque mobile home park – and then do absolutely nothing.
The delivery: 74,000 fentanyl pills.
DEA agents wrote it in a report and went home.
That was not an isolated incident. Government records and three current and former DEA agents confirm Howell's Albuquerque unit watched similar deliveries pile up while Biden-appointed prosecutors blocked every attempt to seize the drugs.
Howell counted at least 1.8 million fentanyl pills his unit allowed to reach the streets.
A former DEA supervisor confirmed millions more flowed during a separate multi-state investigation – pills the agency cannot now account for.
The Biden DOJ rewrote its own fentanyl protocols in 2024 to make sure agents had "discretion" to let it happen.
The Trump administration designated fentanyl a weapon of mass destruction.
Biden's DOJ handed it to drug dealers.
DEA Whistleblower David Howell and the Fentanyl Shipments Nobody Seized
Howell did not stay quiet.
He filed formal complaints with the U.S. Office of Special Counsel, which found "a substantial likelihood of wrongdoing" – then asked the Justice Department to investigate itself.
That went nowhere under Biden.
Howell kept pushing. In early 2024, he told the DOJ's Office of Professional Responsibility that agents had watched deliveries of 150,000 and 50,000 pills go unseized. The response from Biden-appointed prosecutors: pull him off testimony in federal cases entirely.
"Howell's view was, if you have fentanyl in front of you, you need to interdict it," said Tristan Leavitt, president of Empower Oversight, the whistleblower advocacy group representing him. "That's how we save lives."
Biden's U.S. Attorney in New Mexico, Alex Uballez, had a different view.
"The bigger fish are worth catching," Uballez told the AP.
He did not explain how many people had to die first.
New Mexico's overdose deaths rose 21% last year – while they fell 14% nationwide.
Howell flagged one of those cases personally: a 15-month-old toddler who died after ingesting fentanyl residue in Española.
"We poisoned our community to make cases," Howell said. "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."
Biden Gutted the DOJ Fentanyl Protocols the Same Year Overdose Deaths Spiked in New Mexico
Obama's Justice Department ran Operation Fast and Furious between 2009 and 2011 – walking more than 2,000 guns across the border to Mexican cartel members on the theory that tracking them would land bigger targets. The guns vanished. Two of them were recovered at the scene where cartel members shot and killed Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry in the Arizona desert in December 2010.
Eric Holder was held in contempt of Congress for refusing to hand over documents. Obama invoked executive privilege to protect him.
Nobody went to prison.
The DOJ's response to that scandal was to develop strict fentanyl protocols in 2017 specifically requiring agents to "seize or otherwise prevent the distribution" of the drug "as soon as practicable" – because fentanyl, unlike guns, kills in milligrams.
Biden's DOJ quietly gutted those protocols in 2024, the same year Howell was begging them to act.
New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham – a Democrat – put it in writing.
"Make no mistake," Lujan Grisham wrote. "The DEA knew people would die if these pills made it into New Mexico communities, and the agency let it happen anyway."
The result, she said: "hundreds of New Mexican parents burying their kids."
She asked state Attorney General Raúl Torrez to investigate whether federal agents broke state law and prosecute anyone responsible – badge or not.
Torrez opened the criminal investigation on June 26.
The Trump administration's DEA Administrator Terry Cole requested a DOJ Inspector General probe. The Justice Department confirmed it to the Daily Signal: "The alleged conduct occurred under the Biden administration's disastrous open border policies."
Sen. Bernie Moreno of Ohio is demanding a full congressional accounting. "How many thousands of American lives were lost because the Biden DEA refused to act as deadly fentanyl poured over Biden's open border?" Moreno posted on X. "I intend to find out."
Three separate investigations are now open into conduct Biden's Justice Department buried for three years – and the people who ran it can still be subpoenaed, deposed, and prosecuted.
- Fred Lucas, "DEA Chief Calls for IG Probe in Biden-Era Fentanyl Fast and Furious Program," The Daily Signal, June 26, 2026.
- "Staggering Amounts of Fentanyl Hit Streets as DEA Watched and Took No Action, Records Show," Associated Press/PBS NewsHour, June 23, 2026.
- "Fast and Furious 2.0? Biden DEA Let 1M Fentanyl Pills Flow to Streets, Whistleblower Lawyer Says," Just the News, June 23, 2026.
- "Feds Allowed Millions of Fentanyl Pills to 'Walk' on New Mexico Streets: DEA Whistleblower," The National News Desk, June 24, 2026.
- "New Mexico AG Opens Criminal Investigation Into DEA Over Allegations Agents Let Fentanyl Flood State," Fox News, June 26, 2026.
- "New Mexico Governor Calls for Criminal Probe of DEA Allowing Fentanyl Shipments to Hit Streets," Washington Examiner, June 24, 2026.
- "Operation Fast and Furious: How a Botched Justice Department Operation Led to a Standoff over Executive Privilege," The Heritage Foundation.