Virginia Democrats’ Weed Bust Corruption Defense Goes Up In Smoke

When FBI agents and an armored vehicle rolled into a Portsmouth strip mall on Wednesday morning and ordered employees of a cannabis dispensary out with their hands up, Virginia Democrats had their narrative ready before the agents had finished bagging evidence. Sen. L. Louise Lucas, the most powerful Democrat in Richmond and the co-owner of the dispensary in question, declared that the search of her legislative office and her business was “about power and who is allowed to use it on behalf of the people.” House Speaker Don Scott blamed President Donald Trump’s “abuse of the Department of Justice.” Congressman Bobby Scott invoked the redistricting referendum Lucas had championed two weeks earlier. The Virginia Legislative Black Caucus warned of “personal political persecution.” Attorney General Jay Jones suggested the public should distrust the U.S. Attorney’s Office. 

There is one inconvenient fact that none of them addressed. 

The corruption probe that produced Wednesday’s warrants did not begin on January 20, 2025. It did not begin under Attorney General Pam Bondi or FBI Director Kash Patel. It began under former President Joe Biden, Attorney General Merrick Garland, and FBI Director Christopher Wray. CNN reported, citing a source familiar with the matter, that the searches are part of a federal corruption investigation related to marijuana dispensaries that opened during the prior administration. The New York Times confirmed the same timeline. The investigation predates the redistricting fight by years, predates Trump’s second term entirely, and was approved at every step by a Justice Department that Democrats themselves repeatedly described as the most professional in modern history. 

That alone collapses the political-persecution defense. But the public record offers more. 

In April, a federal grand jury indicted Carlton Upton Jr. on three felony counts of wire fraud. Upton owns one of the dispensaries searched on Wednesday and, according to local reporting, previously worked with Lucas as a business partner. Federal prosecutors do not obtain wire fraud indictments from grand juries on a hunch, and they certainly do not execute coordinated raids on a sitting state senator’s office, her business, and additional locations across the Commonwealth without a federal magistrate first reviewing a sworn affidavit and finding probable cause. A judge signed those warrants. Whether or not Lucas herself is ever charged, something in the underlying conduct of this enterprise persuaded a court that evidence of federal crimes was likely to be found inside her office.

The Democratic response has been to act as if none of this matters. Lucas’s own statement did not address the substance of the investigation at all. She did not deny wrongdoing. She did not explain her financial relationship with the dispensary or with Upton. She pivoted directly to redistricting and Donald Trump. That is the move of a politician whose lawyers have told her not to engage on the merits, dressed up as a press release about democracy. 

Speaker Scott’s complaint that Fox News appeared on the scene before local outlets is similarly beside the point. Reporters are constantly tipped off about federal raids. The interesting question is not who arrived first at the parking lot. The interesting question is what was inside the boxes that agents carried out. 

There is a broader pattern worth noticing here, and it has nothing to do with Trump. Virginia legalized adult marijuana possession in 2021, but never built a functioning legal retail market. Into that vacuum stepped a gray-market industry of “gifting” shops, hemp-derived THC outlets, and storefronts operating in legal twilight, several of them with politically connected ownership. Sen. Lucas has been one of the General Assembly’s loudest advocates for expanding cannabis commerce, including legislation that would have routed tax revenue from sales into state coffers. When a state’s most powerful budget writer is also a co-owner of businesses operating in the very industry she is trying to regulate and tax, the conditions for federal interest are not manufactured by the White House. They are created by the senator. 

Virginians are entitled to a presumption of innocence for Sen. Lucas, and she will receive one. What she is not entitled to is the conversion of every serious federal investigation involving a Democrat into a referendum on Donald Trump. Wednesday’s raid was authorized by a federal judge, executed pursuant to a probe opened under a Democratic administration, and follows a federal indictment of her former business partner. The political-persecution script does not survive contact with the calendar. 

The voters of the Commonwealth deserve to know what happened in those Portsmouth offices. They will not learn it from a press release that mentions Donald Trump six times and the underlying facts zero.

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Del. Wren Williams represents Virginia’s 47th House District (Patrick County and surrounding area). He is an attorney and a member of the House Republican Caucus.