A nonprofit alleges that a contractor for the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) faced retaliation for making a protected whistleblower disclosure.

Empower Oversight, a nonprofit that works with government whistleblowers, sent a letter to Sean O’Neill, Assistant Inspector General at the Department of Justice, asking him to investigate alleged retaliation against Kevin Small, a senior financial investigator contracted with the DEA. Small was aware of the Biden administration allowing more than 1 million fentanyl pills to flow to the streets of New Mexico, which was revealed after Special Agent David Howell came forward as a whistleblower.

"Fast and Furious" version 2.0

“Shortly after SA Howell blew the whistle on this practice in 2023, Mr. Small attended a wiretap minimization meeting where two female Assistant United States Attorneys (AUSAs) from the United States Attorney’s Office for the District of New Mexico (USAO-NM) explicitly directed those present not to discuss the case with SA Howell. As the USAO-NM further retaliated against SA Howell, Mr. Small told other people in the Albuquerque District Office that what the USAO-NM was doing was wrong, and that the DEA needed to stand up for SA Howell,” wrote Tristan Leavitt, president of Empower Oversight. 

“Instead, Mr. Small soon became aware that the El Paso Division started locking down access to case files, which he believed was to prevent SA Howell or others from learning about additional fentanyl walking. The Albuquerque District Office also started locking access to the wire room, with only specific DEA personnel permitted to enter. Because Mr. Small was seen still talking to SA Howell on a regular basis, he was also excluded from entering the wire room.”

Howell’s disclosures were originally reported by the Associated Press, which Small also spoke with, according to Empower Oversight. Leavitt’s letter to the Inspector General alleges that, after the AP article, Small was called into the office of the highest-ranking official in the DEA’s Albuquerque district office and was told: “If you support David Howell, we’re through.”

"A gamble that wasn’t worth the risk," Howells says

Small was, according to Empower, given “strict new work hours […] eliminated his flexibility for making up time, and required new mandatory reporting of his work activities.”

Just the News previously reported that the DEA’s administrator asked the IG to independently review the operations in New Mexico, saying that doing so would confirm that the DEA acted "lawfully, professionally and in accordance with Department of Justice (DOJ) policy,” and would bolster public confidence.

Howell’s bombshell revelations, which included multiple interviews with the AP and hundreds of internal DEA records, were first reported in June and alleged that DEA agents monitored shipments of fentanyl but didn’t seize them in order to bring in major drug traffickers. The move was a gamble that wasn’t worth the risk, Howell told the AP.

“We poisoned our community to make cases,” Howell told the outlet. “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.”

DEA spokesperson Amanda Wozniak told the AP in an email at the time that “[p]ublic descriptions suggesting that DEA knowingly permitted fentanyl to reach communities are false and fundamentally mischaracterize the facts.”

Following the original report, Empower Oversight president Leavitt compared the disclosure to the Obama-era scandal known as "Fast and Furious," in which the federal government allowed weapons to flow across the U.S.-Mexico border to the drug cartel in order to track where they went. The administration lost track of the guns and several were found at the scene where Border Patrol agent Brian Terry was murdered. Although charged with contempt of Congress, then-Attorney General Eric Holder avoided prosecution, CNN and others reported.

"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 in an interview on the Just the News, No Noise television show. "Well, in 2019 they adopted a similar protocol for fentanyl.”