FBI Director Kash Patel has confirmed that the bureau will leave its headquarters in the J. Edgar Hoover Building in downtown Washington D.C. and transfer 1,500 employees to other locations around the United States.
Patel said the Hoover Building is being vacated as it is "unsafe," adding that the agency does not deserve to work in the aging structure, reports The New York Post Friday.
"We want the American men and women to know if you're going to come work at the premier law enforcement agency in the world, we're going to give you a building that's commensurate with that, and that's not this place," he told Fox Business anchor Maria Bartiromo in an interview for her Fox News program "Sunday Morning Futures."
The FBI chief didn't outline what safety hazards are going on at the giant building, located on Pennsylvania Avenue between the White House and the U.S. Capitol, but the building has been draped with nets to keep passersby from being hit with concrete that has been falling from it.
Patel also did not specify a time frame for the move or where the bureau's new headquarters will be located.
The Hoover Building, which has come under complaints from President Donald Trump during both terms, was finished in 1975 after being under construction for 10 years.
Before he entered politics, Trump in 2013 said he was considering buying the structure from the U.S. government to use as a private project.
And by 2018, when Trump was in his first term as president, he insisted that he wanted the building to go, as he thought it was "one of the ugliest buildings in the city."
"It's one of the brutalist-type buildings, you know, brutalist architecture," he commented.
Earlier this year, Trump said his administration would build another FBI building in the same location as the Hoover Building, "because the FBI and DOJ have to be near each other."
Former President Joe Biden's administration, however, had plans for moving the headquarters to Greenbelt, Maryland, but Trump blocked that plan after an inspector general's report determined that the selection process had passed over a site in Springfield, Virginia.
Patel told Bartiromo that the FBI is not fully manned, but when it is, 38,000 people are employed.
"In the national capital region, in the 50-mile radius around Washington, D.C., there were 11,000 FBI employees," he said. "That's like a third of the workforce. A third of the crime doesn't happen here, so we are taking 1,500 of those folks and moving them out."
This means every state will get a supplemental supply of agents.
"When we do things like that, we inspire folks in America to become intel analysts and agents and say 'We want to work at the FBI because we want to fight violent crime and we want to be sent out into the country to do it,'" said Patel. "In the next three, six, nine months, we're going to be doing that hard."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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