Politics
JUST IN: Kash Patel Announces Groundbreaking Change For FBI, Follows Through On Major Promise
FBI Director Kash Patel will soon make good on a campaign promise to rip his agency up from its longtime headquarters and relocate thousands of agents to more strategic sites around the U.S., he announced Thursday.
The J. Edgar Hoover Building, which has housed the FBI headquarters since 1975, is “no longer safe” or relevant to the needs of agents in the field who rarely deal with a third of its cases — the same percentage of its workforce that commutes to the facility each day.
“The FBI is 38,000 when we’re fully manned, which we’re not. In the national capital region, in the 50-miles radius around Washington, D.C. there were 11,000 FBI agents. That’s like a third of the workforce,” Patel explained to Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo.
“A third of the crime doesn’t happen here. So we’re taking 1,500 of those folks and moving them out.”
Not only will the change put FBI agents closer to their crime scenes, Patel said, but he hopes the embedment of the workforce in American communities will inspire the next generation of young people to join a depoliticized Bureau in need of new talent.
“I think when we do things like that, we inspire folks in America to become intel analysts and agents and say ‘we wanna go work at the FBI because we wanna fight violent crime,'” he added.
The change is expected to take place over the next three to nine months, according to Patel, and coincide with a full departure from the Hoover Building.
“This building is unsafe for our workforce,” he went on. “We want the American people to know, if you want to go 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.”
WATCH:
Even before his appointment, Patel was vociferous about his intent to separate the FBI from the Hoover Building, which was built for its proximity to power but over subsequent decades has been reevaluated as a symbol of disconnect between agents and the communities they serve.
In January, he told a conservative podcast host that he intended to exit the facility on day one.
“I’d shut down the F.B.I. Hoover Building on Day 1 and reopen it the next day as a museum of the ‘deep state,’” Mr. Patel said on “The Shawn Ryan Show,” the NYT previously reported. “Then, I’d take the 7,000 employees that work in that building and send them across America to chase down criminals. Go be cops. You’re cops — go be cops.”
Thursday’s announcement ostensibly puts to rest President Donald Trump’s previous promise to build a sprawling new campus for the FBI in Washington, D.C. Last year he called the proposal a “centerpiece of my plan to totally renovate and rebuild our capital city.”
The Bureau’s second largest footprint is in Huntsville, Ala. where many of the D.C. agents are expected to be transferred. It has been long referred to informally at the FBI’s “second headquarters,” former agents told the outlet.
