A lawyer for DEA Special Agent David Howell says the Biden-era operation ignored Justice Department fentanyl protocols and endangered the public while prosecutors pursued larger trafficking cases.
By yourNEWS Media Newsroom
A Drug Enforcement Administration whistleblower alleges that federal officials allowed more than 1 million fentanyl pills to move onto New Mexico streets during the Biden administration, according to his attorney, who compared the case to the Obama-era Operation Fast and Furious scandal.
Attorney Tristan Leavitt, president of the whistleblower center Empower Oversight, said DEA Special Agent David Howell has evidence that the DEA and federal prosecutors in New Mexico deliberately declined to seize major fentanyl shipments while pursuing larger drug-trafficking cases, Just the News reported.
Howell, a 14-year DEA veteran, filed a whistleblower complaint in late 2023 with the U.S. Office of Special Counsel. The complaint alleged that the DEA and the U.S. Attorney’s Office in New Mexico knowingly allowed large fentanyl shipments to continue moving, including deliveries of 150,000 pills and 50,000 pills.
The Office of Special Counsel later asked the Justice Department to investigate after finding “a substantial likelihood of wrongdoing.”
Leavitt said the alleged operation conflicted with the DEA’s own public warnings about fentanyl’s lethality.
“DEA has a campaign that says one pill can kill, and so the DEA allowing this to happen was really significant. It was driven also by the US Attorney’s Office in New Mexico,” Leavitt said Monday night.
Leavitt said the case resembled Operation Fast and Furious, the 2009-2011 scandal in which federal authorities allowed semiautomatic firearms to move across the border in an effort to track Mexican drug cartels, despite risks to public safety.
“After Fast and Furious, the Justice Department headquarters adopted a protocol that said if you have a wiretap and you know that firearms are going to be trafficked, you have to try and stop them,” Leavitt said. “Well, in 2019 they adopted a similar protocol for fentanyl.
“So the Justice Department’s guidance was really ignored in Albuquerque, because the U.S. attorney decided to cowboy and do his own thing in hopes of making a bigger case,” he added.
Leavitt said federal officials prioritized “catching the big fish” and “taking down an entire organization” while failing to properly weigh the danger to the public. He said fentanyl presents a different risk than drugs such as cocaine or marijuana because a tiny amount can be fatal.
President Donald Trump classified fentanyl as a weapon of mass destruction in a December 2025 executive order. His administration also oversaw the largest fentanyl pill seizure in DEA history in Albuquerque after he returned to office.
Leavitt said it is difficult to determine how many deaths or overdoses may be connected to the alleged operation because fentanyl pills do not have serial numbers, unlike firearms in the Fast and Furious scandal.
He said more than 1 million pills “walked” during the operation and suggested a significant portion of New Mexico’s fentanyl deaths could be tied to those decisions. He also said New Mexico recorded higher fentanyl overdose rates than any other state during the two-year period at issue.
“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.”
Leavitt said Howell was punished after blowing the whistle. According to Leavitt, after Howell’s first pill seizure, the U.S. Attorney’s Office told him he was no longer allowed to testify in any cases, effectively sidelining him from investigations.
“Howell’s view was, if you have fentanyl in front of you, you need to interdict it,” Leavitt said. “That’s how we save lives.”
Leavitt said he hopes Congress and the Justice Department inspector general launch parallel investigations to determine how many people were harmed, how the alleged operation was allowed to proceed and what safeguards are needed to prevent a repeat.
The allegations place the DEA and federal prosecutors in New Mexico under new scrutiny over whether investigative ambitions were allowed to outweigh immediate public safety risks during one of the deadliest phases of the fentanyl crisis.
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