Vice President Mike Pence was one short plane ride away from shaking hands with an alleged interstate drug dealer.
Pence abruptly canceled his trip to Manchester, N.H., earlier this month but never said why he was pulled from Air Force Two at the last minute.
The vice president’s aides and even President Donald Trump himself kept up the suspense. “You’ll know in about two weeks,” Trump told reporters at the time. “There was a very interesting problem that they had in New Hampshire.”
Among the problems was a federal law enforcement probe involving individuals Pence would likely encounter, according to a law enforcement official briefed on the incident. If Pence stepped off the vice presidential aircraft, one of the people he would have seen on the ground was under investigation by the Drug Enforcement Administration for moving more than $100,000 of fentanyl from Massachusetts to New Hampshire.
Jeff Hatch, who agreed in federal court Friday to plead guilty and will face up to four years in prison, works for an opioid addiction treatment center in southern New Hampshire that Pence was set to visit. A former New York Giants player, he has spoken publicly for years about his own challenge with drug and alcohol addiction, which ended his football career.He has been on stage with Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) and is known throughout the state for warning students about the dangers of using drugs. “He has been beaten down in the past, but now stands tall in front of audiences to personally share his compelling story,” says a listing offering him to speak to groups.
The vice president’s office declined to comment, and Pence has declined to discuss the incident. The early July event had been billed by his office as “a roundtable discussion with former patients and alumni at the Granite Recovery Center headquarters” followed by remarks from Pence “on the opioid crisis and illegal drug flow in New Hampshire.” The vice president’s aides have said they would reschedule his trip to New Hampshire.
Federal court documents released Friday said Hatch was caught in 2017 with 1,500 grams of fentanyl. A baggie of the drug sold on the streets of New Hampshire is usually about one-tenth of a gram.
Earlier that year, federal, state and local police began an investigation into a supplier of drugs flowing into Manchester, N.H, an area hit hard by the opioid epidemic. More than 500 people a year have been dying in New Hampshire for the last several years and the crisis does not appear to be abating.
Federal authorities focused on Hatch. In court documents, they allege Hatch made a call in the early morning hours of July 25, 2017, to arrange a pickup of drugs from a supplier in Lawrence, Mass.