A U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agent has evidence that his agency and federal prosecutors let more than 1 million fentanyl pills flow onto the streets of New Mexico during the Biden era and then tried to silence him from testifying after he blew the whistle, the agent's lawyer tells Just the News.

"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," Attorney Tristan Leavitt, president of the Empower Oversight, whistleblower center, said in an interview Monday night.

Leavitt's group represents DEA Special Agent David Howell, a 14-year veteran of the agency whose whistleblower complaint was chronicled by The Associated Press in a bombshell article Monday.

Leavitt compared his client's allegations to the Obama-era Fast and Furious scandal in which the federal government allowed semiautomatic weapons to flow across the border to the drug cartels, putting American lives in danger.

"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," he said in an interview on the Just the News, No Noise television show. "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.

Howell first filed a whistleblower complaint in late 2023 with the U.S. Office of Special Counsel disclosing that the DEA and U.S. Attorney's Office in New Mexico deliberately did not seize large shipments of fentanyl, including deliveries of 150,000 and 50,000 pills.

The Office of Special Counsel then asked the Justice Department to investigate after finding “a substantial likelihood of wrongdoing.”

Leavitt told Just the News on Monday this case proves the Biden-run Justice Department didn’t properly weigh public safety risks against its hopes of “catching the big fish” and “taking down an entire organization," and that the DOJ didn't learn its lesson after the the Fast and Furious scandal.

The public safety challenge concerning the fentanyl operation, according to Leavitt, is that the drug is so deadly that even a tiny amount could kill someone, which is where it differs from drugs like cocaine and marijuana.

President Donald Trump even established fentanyl as a weapon of mass destruction in a December 2025 executive order, and his administration oversaw the largest seizure of fentanyl pills in DEA history in Albuquerque when he took office for the second time.

Leavitt noted it’s a bit harder to track how many people were affected in this case compared to Operation Fast and Furious because, unlike the guns, there are no serial numbers on the pills.

Leavitt said more than a million pills "walked" in the operation, suggesting that a large portion of New Mexico’s fentanyl deaths could be related to the operation. He noted the state even saw higher fentanyl overdoses than any other state in the country during the two-year span.

“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.”

Howell got in trouble with the U.S. Attorney’s Office for blowing the whistle, and was even told after his first pill seizure that he was no longer allowed to testify in any cases, essentially sidelining him.

“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 to see parallel congressional and DOJ Inspector General investigations to get to the bottom of how many people the operation harmed, how exactly it happened and how to ensure it doesn’t happen again.

Katherine Pugh is a reporter for Just the News. Follow her on X for more coverage.