{"id":162553,"date":"2026-04-10T17:43:09","date_gmt":"2026-04-10T17:43:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/162553\/"},"modified":"2026-04-10T17:43:09","modified_gmt":"2026-04-10T17:43:09","slug":"kash-patel-and-sen-david-mccormick-speak-on-efforts-to-curb-drug-trade","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/162553\/","title":{"rendered":"Kash Patel and Sen. David McCormick speak on efforts to curb drug trade"},"content":{"rendered":"

ALLENTOWN, Pa. \u2014\u00a0FBI Director Kash Patel<\/a> joined a roundtable hosted by Sen. David McCormick<\/a> (R-PA) earlier this month to discuss the work the Trump administration<\/a>, Congress<\/a>, local law enforcement, and area prosecutors have done to curb the fentanyl <\/a>trade in Pennsylvania<\/a> over the past 13 months.<\/p>\n

McCormick led the packed event at the Edward N. Chan Federal Building and said that, while the state\u2019s death rate due to fentanyl overdoses has significantly decreased over the past year and a half, there was still work to be done. The senator said that\u00a0fentanyl killed 4,000 Pennsylvanians per year between 2020 and 2023, but preliminary data showed that number\u00a0fell to approximately 1,500 in 2025.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat is the lowest number in a decade,\u201d McCormick said.<\/p>\n

\"Sen.Sen. Dave McCormick (R-PA), left, joins FBI Director Kash Patel at a public roundtable in Allentown, Pennsylvania, addressing fentanyl use, April 1, 2026. (Justin Merriman \/ for the Washington Examiner)<\/p>\n

Patel credited the disruption of trafficking networks, enhanced enforcement efforts, and the direction of treatment and recovery programs for the substantial progress.<\/p>\n

Sitting across from Patel and McCormick were the Cullen, Miller, and Ott families, all of whom lost children to fentanyl. They discussed the pain and devastation they experienced, stressing they don\u2019t want to see it happen to another family.<\/p>\n

In 2024, President Donald Trump<\/a> campaigned on a drug war approach to fentanyl. This included strong border security and enforcement, pressure on foreign nations such as China<\/a> and Mexico<\/a> to curtail the flow of fentanyl manufacturing and trafficking, and severe legal penalties to disrupt drug supply chains.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Pennsylvania Attorney General Dave Sunday said that because of the state\u2019s collaborative efforts with both the local and federal partners, his office was able to remove a staggering 56.5 million doses of fentanyl last year alone.<\/p>\n

In a joint interview with the Washington Examiner after the roundtable, both McCormick and Patel discussed how moved they were by the families\u2019 stories. They said the success of the past year was an inspiration to increase their efforts going forward. Patel discussed his visit with his counterpart in China, which resulted in increased export controls on the 13 precursor chemicals used by Mexican cartels to produce fentanyl.<\/p>\n

\"AA drug user injects himself with a mix of heroin and fentanyl in Philadelphia\u2019s Kensington neighborhood, July 19, 2021. (Spencer Platt\/Getty)<\/p>\n

WASHINGTON EXAMINER: You discussed numbers today in the fentanyl crisis, but you also sat across the table of families who were one of those numbers, what is the human element of this crisis like for you when you are face to face with the victims?\u00a0<\/p>\n

PATEL: It\u2019s two things: It\u2019s heartbreaking, and it\u2019s inspiring. It\u2019s heartbreaking because you have something that\u2019s irreplaceable that they lost that maybe could have been prevented if the prior administration had taken the steps we are taking. It\u2019s also inspiring because you know that you can take their stories, and our agents live and breathe them every day at the FBI, and say, \u201cwe\u2019re going to stop the next one.\u201d<\/p>\n

And how do we learn from what happened to them to save the next life, or the next 10 lives, or a hundred or thousand lives? So for me, getting out of D.C. and meeting the Americans that are impacted by what we do in Washington, and where we came up short, and where we succeeded, is truly some of the best trips I can do. And coming to Pennsylvania is exactly that.<\/p>\n

WASHINGTON EXAMINER: Do your agents talk to you about the impact it has on them? What do your agents tell you when they talk to you about this?<\/p>\n

PATEL: My agents, almost 12,000 of them, tell me what my agents told me here today, which is, thanks for taking the shackles off us. Thanks for removing the bureaucracy and thanks for letting us do what we signed up to do, which is crush violent crime and defend the homeland. And it wasn\u2019t anything that was new or super secret. It was simply letting them do what they signed up to do, the mission. And I hear that in every single state I go to, and that\u2019s how I know we are on the right track.<\/p>\n

\"PeoplePeople gather on a street overtaken by drug users in the Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia, July 19, 2021. (Spencer Platt\/Getty)<\/p>\n

WASHINGTON EXAMINER: Sen. McCormick, you did a lot of events running for office around the fentanyl crisis, including with Sheriff Ott of Blairsville, who lost a son. What have you learned from these relationships? What\u2019s it like for you?<\/p>\n

McCORMICK: It was probably the most shocking thing I discovered on the campaign trail. The scale, 4,000 Pennsylvanians, 100,000 Americans, and you look at those statistics and people\u2019s eyes glass over the numbers, but again, that is someone\u2019s family in those numbers. The reference point is how many people died in Vietnam, remember, 52,000 people died in Vietnam. 100,000 died [from] fentanyl in one year. So it\u2019s just so shocking. So you have the shock effect. But then I met, through the campaign, with a number of families that were affected by it. And I did a sheriff\u2019s event where all the sheriffs came out to endorse me, and Sheriff Ott said, \u201cCan I speak with you privately?\u201d And he had heard me talking about fentanyl. He said, \u201cI think I can help you on this.\u201d He said, \u201cI lost my son.\u201d And he and I sort of bonded from that point forward, and he became my biggest advocate.<\/p>\n

Every time you hear these parents\u2019 stories, it\u2019s so excruciating. And as a father of six daughters, just to imagine it. And two of these cases, the kids didn\u2019t even know they were ingesting fentanyl. It\u2019s a poison that was integrated in other things.<\/p>\n

WASHINGTON EXAMINER: What did you do once you were sworn in?<\/p>\n

McCORMICK: Once I got to Washington, I was like, \u201cWhat can we do? \u201d And of course, the president was all over this, secure the border, China. And I tried to do my part in legislation. So I\u2019m involved. I\u2019m a co-sponsor of five or six bills that are focused specifically on fentanyl or synthetics, the next generation, nidosine, and things like that.<\/p>\n

We have leadership [with] the president, we have leadership with the director, we have it in Congress, the U.S. attorney, these districts, everybody, you can feel it. They are focused. You didn\u2019t see one person in this roundtable try to sort of bigfoot anybody else and take credit. Of course, the resources are a critical part of it, but I think the focus and the team at that ethos, \u201cwe\u2019re going to crush this thing,\u201d is what\u2019s making a difference.<\/p>\n

WASHINGTON EXAMINER: Director Patel, can you please discuss the root causes of the fentanyl crisis? And is that why [you visited] China last November, where the components are made, then shipped to countries south of our border?<\/p>\n

PATEL: We needed a couple of things to happen. We needed a commander in chief who was willing to engage on the global stage with efficacy. And that\u2019s what we have with President Trump. He met with President Xi [Jinping] \u2026 and they set up the framework for fentanyl, specifically for the scourge and crisis of fentanyl in America. And then, my trip to Beijing for the first time in over a decade as FBI director, would show up and engage with my counterparts for the first time. And thanks to President Trump\u2019s leadership, we were able to come to an agreement to shut off the 13 precursors that the Mexican drug traffickers were using to make the fentanyl.<\/p>\n

That was a critical point of it. Reaching that historic agreement was attacking it at the source in terms of origination materials. President Trump didn\u2019t stop there. We are still going with ferocity after the drug traffickers in Mexico, and he was the one that designated them foreign terrorist organizations, giving us law enforcement more tools that we can use like we used to do to manhunt al Qaeda and ISIS. We\u2019re now doing it against the Gulf Cartel, CGNC, and every cartel down there.<\/p>\n

So when you set up on both sets of the spectrum, you\u2019re able to really attack this problem. And that\u2019s why you saw the historic results. I mean, we say these numbers, and I didn\u2019t get to say this earlier, these are truly historic numbers for law enforcement and for President Trump, who backed law enforcement. We have saved hundreds of thousands of lives under this commander in chief.<\/p>\n

We have taken enough fentanyl [off the] streets to [kill] 178 million Americans in one year. That\u2019s a 31% increase. Murder rate\u2019s down 20%. Opioid deaths are down 20%. I mean, the list goes on. Any one of those for just the FBI would have been a banner a year. And thanks to President Trump, we\u2019ve done it all in 13, 14 months. And we\u2019re not stopping \u2026 until we completely annihilate the problem. So starting the precursors and then meeting the problem head-on in Mexico.<\/p>\n

LINDA MCMAHON HITS THE ROAD<\/a><\/p>\n

WASHINGTON EXAMINER: What was your reception like in China?\u00a0<\/p>\n

PATEL: They were more than receptive. If they weren\u2019t receptive, we wouldn\u2019t have walked out of there with an agreement with President Trump and the Chinese government to shut off the precursors.<\/p>\n

They got it. And that\u2019s because he set the stage and led that effort and made fentanyl, made attacking the fentanyl crisis a priority for law enforcement. That\u2019s what we did. And I mean, that in and of itself, getting an agreement with modern-day China and the United States of America to attack drug trafficking is in itself history.<\/p>\n

Salena Zito (@ZitoSalena) is a senior writer for the Washington Examiner and author of the New York Times bestseller Butler: The Untold Story of the Near Assassination of Donald Trump and the Fight for America\u2019s Heartland.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"ALLENTOWN, Pa. \u2014\u00a0FBI Director Kash Patel joined a roundtable hosted by Sen. David McCormick (R-PA) earlier this month…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":162554,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[119,121,120,31,30411,73356,5876,11009,3635,12313,11271,73357,47,28,1427],"class_list":{"0":"post-162553","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-allentown","8":"tag-allentown","9":"tag-allentown-headlines","10":"tag-allentown-news","11":"tag-crime","12":"tag-david-mccormick","13":"tag-drug-policy","14":"tag-drug-trafficking","15":"tag-drugs","16":"tag-fbi","17":"tag-fentanyl","18":"tag-kash-patel","19":"tag-magazine-features","20":"tag-mental-health","21":"tag-pennsylvania","22":"tag-police-and-law-enforcement"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/162553","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=162553"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/162553\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/162554"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=162553"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=162553"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=162553"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}