President Donald Trump speaks to law enforcement officials on the street gang MS-13 in July.Evan Vucci/AP
Acting Drug Enforcement Administration head Chuck Rosenberg is expected to resign at the end of the week over his growing dissatisfaction with President Donald Trump’s lack of respect for the law, the New York Times reported Tuesday.
In August, after the president told law enforcement officers in New York that they shouldn’t be “too nice” to criminal suspects, Rosenberg told DEA staffers in an internal email that Trump’s remarks had “condoned police misconduct” and that staffers needed to instead “keep the public trust and continue to hold ourselves to the very highest standards.”
The Times reported that Rosenberg, a career prosecutor who was appointed by President Barack Obama in 2015 and had previously served as chief of staff to former FBI Director James Comey, told Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein in July that he had no intention of staying on as a permanent director of the DEA nor did he want another position at the Justice Department. (The Washington Post reported Tuesday that Col. Joseph R. Fuentes, head of the New Jersey State Police, was a leading contender to replace Rosenberg.)
In recent months, Trump’s DOJ has been at odds with the DEA, blocking the DEA from growing marijuana for research and pressing for action on the gang MS-13, even though DEA officials told the Washington Post that Mexican cartels posed a larger problem for battling narcotics distribution.
