Secret Service: Cocaine found in West Wing of White House

The Secret Service has identified a substance found at the White House as cocaine, according to various media reports and police and fire radio communications.

The White House was briefly evacuated Sunday evening while President Joe Biden was at Camp David in Maryland after the Secret Service discovered a suspicious powder in a common area of the West Wing. A preliminary test showed the substance to be cocaine, two law enforcement officials said Tuesday.

The power was found in a small bag, NBC News reported.

The West Wing is an area attached to the executive mansion where the president lives and includes the Oval Office, cabinet room and press area, along with offices and workspace for the president's advisers and staff. Hundreds of people work there or pass through the West Wing regularly.

A senior law enforcement official said that the substance was found in a storage facility in a cubby used by White House staff and guests to store cellphones, according to CBS News.

Secret Service agents were doing routine checks around 6 pm Sunday when they found the white powder in an area accessible to tour groups, not in any particular West Wing office, the officials said. They were not authorized to discuss the investigation and spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity.

The Washington Post reported that "a firefighter with the DC department's hazardous materials team radioed the results of a test" of the item, citing an online database of emergency responder communications. The radio dispatch said, "We have a yellow bar saying cocaine hydrochloride."

The broadcast from the fire department is logged on a website called openmhz.com, which allows people to listen to live and archived radio transmissions from police and fire departments, the Post reported.

The home page of the openmhz.com website says, "Share the Air. Listen to Police and Fire radio from across the US."

The complex was evacuated at about 8:45 pm Sunday as fire and emergency crews were brought in to do a rapid test, which preliminarily identified cocaine. The White House was soon reopened as the substance was sent for testing.

"On Sunday evening, the White House complex went into a precautionary closure as officers from the Secret Service Uniformed Division investigated an unknown item found inside a work area," said Anthony Guglielmi, a spokesman for the Secret Service. "The item was sent for further evaluation, and an investigation into the cause and manner of how it entered the White House is pending.

"The DC Fire Department was called to evaluate and quickly determined the item to be non-hazardous," the Secret Service added. There was "an investigation into the cause and manner" of how the substance entered the White House, the spokesperson said.

Agencies contributed to this story.