Fact Check

Trump 'Humiliates' Obama After White House Cleaning Staff Finds 'Secret Stash' of Drugs?

Multiple fake news sites shared a fabricated claim that President Trump's new head of housekeeping found President Obama's drug stash.

Published May 22, 2017

 (Shutterstock)
Image Via Shutterstock
Claim:
President Trump's personal housekeeper found President Obama's drug stash during a deep cleaning of the White House.

In late May 2017, several items circulated on Facebook suggesting President Trump's housekeeper found President Obama's drug stash:

The White House cleaning staff that served under Obama was removed and replaced this week with people more familiar and trusted by the Trumps. Their new head of housekeeping, Carmen Ortiz Santiago Delouise, was the head of housekeeping at Mar-A-Lago in Palm Beach Florida, having worked her way up from the laundry room.

Delouise, who has worked for the Trumps for nearly 25 years, was tasked with a super-cleaning of the residence, as the Trumps tend to not feel at home until everything around them has been cleaned, sterilized and scented with the family pheromones. During the cleaning, Delouise and her staff came across a small compartment under a carpet in the master bedroom walk-in closet the Obamas must have forgotten they left there.

Inside they found a box containing 2 marijuana joints, a Zippo lighter and a gram of aged hashish. It seems the Obamas decided they’d use the White House as their own little drug den. Delouise gave her statement to a translator since she still speaks very little English:

“The box was under the board in the closet. It looked very old and had strange letters engraved on it. You could clearly make out a backwards B, an M and what looked like some kind of Muslim symbol.”

Since the claim was published by a number of web sites, users were confused about its origins and veracity. Last Line of Defense, a web site known to publish only fabricated news, published the original article in February 2017. Last Line of Defense's disclaimer states:

DISCLAIMER: America’s Last Line of Defense is a satirical publication that uses the imagination of liberals to expose the extreme bigotry and hate and subsequent blind gullibility that festers in right-wing nutjobs. We present fiction as fact and our sources don’t actually exist. Names that represent actual people and places are purely coincidental and all images should be considered altered and do not in any way depict reality.

Kim LaCapria is a former writer for Snopes.