A candidate for the Missouri state House is accused of trying to plant cocaine and Adderall on a political rival.
Page A2From§Eachthe wee small hours edition — 4 September 2026
Missouri candidate's plot to frame rival with cocaine undone by campaign manager wearing wire for FBI.
As it ran on the front
The FBI's document lays it out flat: Thomas Ross, a candidate for the Missouri state House, is accused of trying to plant cocaine and Adderall on a primary opponent — specifically, in the opponent's purse. Not more mail pieces, not more yard signs. That's the accusation, laid out in an FBI document, not a press release, which is already the tell that something in this race stopped being about votes.
The next beat is the one that makes the story: Ross's own campaign manager wore a wire for the FBI. The person hired to run the campaign instead helped build the case that undid it. There's no way to read that as anything but the plan collapsing from the inside — the informant wasn't a rival operative or an outside investigator, they were on the payroll.…
…(cont) Ross has a line on this too, and the FBI wrote it down: the plot was an "extreme egg in the face." That's Ross's own phrase, in the government's document, describing a plan to put cocaine and Adderall on a political opponent. Egg in the face is what gets used for a bad debate answer or a missed handshake. It is not the usual description for narcotics planted in a purse, and the gap between the phrase and the alleged act says something about how casually the plan was discussed inside the campaign.
What the FBI's document does not establish is who, if anyone, at the county or state party had signed off on the campaign manager's role, or what either organization knew before the recordings started. That gap is real, and it is the one worth sitting with, because a wire only catches what gets said out loud to someone already wearing it.
The plot did not work. The drugs were not planted, the primary opponent was not framed, and the case exists only because someone already inside the operation decided the FBI needed to hear it. That much is documented. Everything upstream of it — who else it happens to, how often it doesn't get caught — is not in the file.
“Ross allegedly wanted to plant cocaine and Adderall on a rival to win a primary for a state house seat, and the person who caught it was on Ross's own campaign, getting paid by Ross's own campaign. That's not opposition research, that's the inside of the operation deciding the operation wasn't worth protecting. Makes you wonder how many of these local races run the same way and just don't have a campaign manager willing to wear a wire.”
“Look, nothing's proven here, this is an accusation, the FBI document speaks for itself and it hasn't gone to trial — my client, did I say client, I mean the candidate, is entitled to due process same as anybody. And frankly a wire from your own campaign manager, that's a loyalty problem in Ross's operation, not a party problem, that's — okay, that one's kind of a party problem.”
The receipts
The drug-planting plot would be an “extreme egg in the face” said Ross, according to the FBI document.
Thomas Ross allegedly conspired to plant cocaine and Adderall in his Republican rival's purse, but his campaign manager wore a wire for the FBI.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.