Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein is planning to stay on at the Justice Department “a little longer” than originally anticipated, according to a Justice official familiar with his thinking.
Initially, he planned to leave in mid-March, but no firm date was ever set and after consulting with Attorney General William Barr, he will now stay in his position a bit longer.
Rosenstein has been at the center of the Justice Department’s implementation of the agency’s revised Federal Wire Act opinion. He delayed any implementation until June 14, according to a memo to all U.S. Attorneys, assistant attorney generals and the director of the FBI. The Justice Department originally delayed the implementation until April 15.
In the memo, Rosenstein wrote the delay was to give “businesses that relied on the 2011 (Office of Legal Counsel) opinion time to bring their operations into compliance with federal law. However, the delay was “an internal exercise of prosecutorial discretion; it is not a safe harbor for violations of the Wire Act.”
He has not given the White House his two weeks’ notice.
Rosenstein has been overseeing the Russia investigation and as CNN has reported, he has signaled to other officials that he would leave when he was satisfied that special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation was either complete or close enough to completion that it was protected.
(CNN contributed to this report)
