‘If the State Department and the White House will not call out this problem, we will never address it,’ says Hagerty
WASHINGTON—United States Senator Bill Hagerty (R-TN) today pressed Assistant Secretary of State Todd Robinson and Director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy Dr. Rahul Gupta on the Biden Administration’s blatant refusal to condemn China for its role in America’s fentanyl crisis during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing. Drug overdoses killed over 100,000 Americans in 2021, with the majority of deaths caused by fentanyl originating from China and coming across our southern border.
“I just got off the phone the other day with a father from my home state of Tennessee who found his son dead on Thanksgiving morning—dead from fentanyl,” Hagerty said. “Each of the three of you have been charged with addressing this surge, yet it continues to run rampant. The number one killer of Americans today, of young people between the ages of 18 and 45, is drug overdose, most of it fentanyl coming across our southern border being supplied by China. Just as Assistant Secretary Robinson mentioned, China is the principal source of these drug precursors that are going to the Mexican cartels.”
After Dr. Gupta told Hagerty that the Biden Administration’s “top” priority is pressing the Chinese Communist Party to stop fentanyl precursors coming from China, Hagerty negated his claim by pointing out that “the White House issued a press release last week on its proposals for cracking down on fentanyl trafficking, yet not once, not once in the entire press release, was China mentioned.” The Senator underscored that during President Biden’s State of the Union address, “not once did the President call out China’s role in this fentanyl crisis.”
Hagerty also called attention to the State Department’s recent press statement announcing sanctions against three Mexican drug traffickers that omitted any mention of China or Chinese links to the sanctioned Mexican drug traffickers.
In response to Hagerty’s question of whether there was any internal disagreement or debate between the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, which Secretary Robinson leads, and the Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs on whether or not to omit any mention of China in the statement, Secretary Robinson said, “There was debate. There was discussion, but at the end of the day, we agreed on the statement,” confirming the Biden Administration’s increasing self-censorship on China’s role in America’s fentanyl crisis and its blatant refusal to call out China for this invasion of America’s sovereignty.
“If the State Department and the White House will not call out this problem, we will never address it,” Hagerty concluded. “I encourage you to get the commander in chief to call it out, and I encourage our top diplomat to call it out, too.”
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