Pence’s trip canceled due to EX-NFL player’s woes

As a crowd gathered in a New Hampshire addiction treatment center earlier this month, Vice President Mike Pence boarded Air Force Two in Washington, ready to jet north for a speech about opioid abuse.

Then, just before noon on July 2, an apologetic spokesman took the stage to announce that Pence had suddenly turned around. The reason? A security concern, his office said. But local police insisted they hadn’t heard of any threats. President Donald Trump later blamed “a very interesting problem.”

“But I can’t tell you about it,” he said.

The truth, as Politico first reported this week, is that Pence’s staff learned that he was about to visit a center where an official was under federal investigation for transporting mass quantities of illegal opioids.

Jeff Hatch, a former NFL lineman who has made headlines discussing his recovery from addiction, pleaded guilty Friday in federal court to smuggling 1,500 grams of fentanyl and selling some to an undercover agent, according to court documents. Hatch, 39, was the chief business development officer for Granite Recovery Centers, which Pence was scheduled to tour on his visit.

The news ends one of the stranger recent mysteries in the Trump administration, but also marks a dark chapter in Hatch’s onceinspiring tale of overcoming years of drug dependence that had been fueled in part by football injuries.

Hatch starred on the offensive line at the University of Pennsylvania, earning all-american honors and becoming a rare Ivy League player drafted into the NFL, where he played four seasons. But he also had struggled with alcohol and drug abuse since high school, as he would later recount in speeches.