President Trump has tapped Terry Cole, the head of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), to lead the federal takeover of the Washington, D.C., police department.
Cole, a longtime DEA agent who was Virginia’s secretary of public safety before joining the Trump administration, will be at the forefront of efforts to stamp out what the president has described as out-of-control crime in the district.
“Our capital city has been overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, drugged-out maniacs and homeless people, and we’re not going to let it happen anymore. We’re not going to take it,” Trump said Monday.
Trump’s takeover is authorized by law for 30 days. He would need congressional approval to legally maintain control after that.
Cole was confirmed as DEA administrator in July in a party-line vote. As Virginia’s public safety secretary under Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R), he oversaw the state’s law enforcement agencies and efforts to combat fentanyl.
“It is a bad day for criminals in Washington, D.C.,” Youngkin wrote on the social platform X. “Terry Cole knows from our partnership with Director @Kash_Patel and General @PamBondi in Virginia that when we back the blue and let police catch criminals- we make our streets safer!”
Prior to his two-year stint in Virginia, Cole worked in the private sector for an intelligence company. On a podcast last year with former Rep. Mary Bono (R-Calif.), Cole said he grew up in a law enforcement family.
DEA career
He joined the DEA in 1997 to combat drugs, but he said he was also attracted to being able to have a post in a foreign country.
“I wanted my kids to grow up diverse. I wanted my kids to experience different cultures. I wanted my kids to explore different countries,” he said. “And I wanted them to remember and see how great this country was each time we came home.”
Cole spent 20 years at the DEA, working as an agent in Bogotá, Colombia; Kabul, Afghanistan; and Mexico City, in addition to spending time in management in Dallas and the D.C. area.
ProPublica reported in April that, as a budding agent in the early 2000s, Cole was dispatched to Bogotá, where the U.S. was in the thick of an ambitious operation called Plan Colombia. The billion-dollar plan hoped to stamp out corruption and combat drug cartels.
DEA agents like Cole worked with vetted teams of Colombian police. In 2006, 10 officers with whom Cole worked were gunned down by Colombian soldiers later convicted of working with a cartel, CNN reported.
On Bono’s podcast, Cole called the killings the “hardest day of my life.” He said he and his family were evacuated from the country a few days later.
Cole then moved to the DEA’s Dallas office, overseeing a probe into Mexican drug cartels. In 2011, Cole’s office received a list of phone numbers that could be used to track leaders of the Zetas, a drug cartel. He passed the information on to the DEA’s offices in Mexico, which in turn gave them to local police, who tipped off the cartel. The Zetas proceeded to terrorize the border town of Allende, kidnapping and killing anyone suspected of involvement in the leak.
Both ProPublica and CNN reported that DEA agents in Mexico — not Cole’s office — were responsible for sharing the information with local police.
News of Cole’s appointment came as Trump also confirmed Monday his administration is looking into rescheduling marijuana as a less dangerous drug.
The Biden administration moved toward making marijuana a Schedule III drug under the Controlled Substances Act, but that proposal has met various political and administrative delays.
Cole said it was “time to move forward” with the process during his Senate confirmation hearing, adding the issue would be among his first priorities as DEA administrator. However, he refused to commit to endorsing the proposal under questioning by Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.).
“I need to understand more where they are and look at the science behind it and listen to the experts and really understand where they are in the process,” Cole said.
