DEA Chief Dials Back Drug War Bluster After Talk With Holder

WASHINGTON -- Drug Enforcement Administrator Michele Leonhart and her boss, Attorney General Eric Holder, appear locked in a bureaucratic staring match over the Obama administration's attempt to reform the way the federal government approaches criminal justice and punishment.

For Holder and for President Barack Obama, sentencing reform has become a critical, second-term legacy item, as they aim to bend the arc of incarceration policy away from a federal system well practiced at imprisoning drug offenders for as long as possible. But those efforts are colliding with institutional resistance from law enforcement officials with a single-minded focus and, perhaps, turf to defend.

The high-level shift toward easing punishment for drug offenders, backed by public opinion, raises the question of whether any DEA chief who could win the support of rank and file agents would be willing to carry out White House reforms. So far, Leonhart appears uninterested, at best.

She publicly distanced herself from Obama's remarks about marijuana's relative harmlessness. She griped about the Justice Department's failure to try to block marijuana legalization in Colorado and Washington state. She clings to a comically outdated view of drugs, refusing to acknowledge a difference between pot and crack cocaine. And this week, her agency picked a fight with Kentucky over the state's purchase of industrial hemp seeds to begin a newly legalized agricultural test.

For now, it's sentencing reform that raises the biggest questions. Leonhart's remarks before the Senate Judiciary Committee last month about mandatory minimum sentences caused people in top echelons of the Justice Department to ask whether she was on board with her bosses on sentencing reform, sources familiar with the tensions told The Huffington Post.

Leonhart was responding to Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), who asked about the importance of mandatory minimums. Some law enforcement groups oppose the Smarter Sentencing Act, a bipartisan bill that would roll back the length of certain mandatory minimum prison terms. Leonhart emphasized the importance of mandatory minimums, leaving the impression she opposed changes to the current sentencing structure, which gives federal prosecutors huge leverage over defendants.

Justice Department concerns about Leonhart were heightened when, after her testimony, a DEA spokeswoman would not say whether Leonhart endorsed changes mandatory minimums, telling The Huffington Post that the DEA administrator's testimony would "have to speak for itself."

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