Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent revealed his personal ties to the American fentanyl crisis in an exclusive interview with Breitbart News, vowing to “come for” Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTOs) behind the tragic deaths.
Speaking with Breitbart News’s Washington Bureau Chief Matthew Boyle at a Wednesday morning policy event in Washington, DC, Bessent said he had two friends die due to fentanyl and advocated for “wiping out” Chinese criminal groups who supply the “precursor drugs” to the deadly poison.
“The Chinese, they sell the precursor drugs for fentanyl. If I hear the ‘Opium War,’ we didn’t create the Opium Wars, and they were able to turn off the supply of rare earth magnets very quickly. If they wanted to, they could turn off the supply of these precursor chemicals,” the secretary said. “I have had two friends from the richest suburb in America, Greenwich, Connecticut, die of fentanyl.”
He added, “Imagine what we [would be] doing if there were a terrorist organization that were killing 200,000 Americans a year. What would we do to them? We’d wipe them out.”
The Department of the Treasury has already unleashed a massive “pressure campaign” on cartels, with Bessent telling Breitbart News in April that his department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctioned leaders and affiliates of Mexican FTOs, including the Beltran Leyva Organization (BLO) and La Nueva Familia Michoacana (LNFM), for their roles in smuggling drugs into the U.S.
“We have declared the cartels FTOs — foreign terrorist organizations — and we’re coming for them,” Bessent added on Wednesday.
Continuing on to lament the families and futures of fentanyl victims are being “destroyed” by the ongoing crisis, the secretary reiterated how close he is to the issue.
“It’s very personal for me because, like I said, I had two children who I watched grow up die.”
Olivia Rondeau is a politics reporter for Breitbart News based in Washington, DC. Find her on X/Twitter and Instagram.
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