FBI moving 1,500 personnel from D.C., closing storied headquarters building: Patel

WASHINGTON − FBI Director Kash Patel announced in a Fox News broadcast Friday that he’s redeploying 1,500 FBI agents, analysts and other personnel from Washington to posts throughout the country, and shutting down the bureau’s storied headquarters because it is “unsafe for our workforce.”

Patel has talked frequently about moving FBI personnel out of the nation’s capital and even shutting down the J. Edgar Hoover FBI Building and making it into some form of a “deep state” museum.

But his comments to Fox News anchor Maria Bartiromo appear to be the most definitive to date in terms of his plans for the FBI and the building named after the bureau's longest-serving director.

Patel said that the FBI currently has about 11,000 of its 38,000 or so staff in the National Capital Region, a 50-mile radius around Washington, D.C.

“It's like a third of the workforce. A third of the crime doesn't happen here. So we're taking 1,500 of those folks and moving them out,” Patel said. “Every state's getting a plus up.”

Patel didn’t say much about the plans to move the FBI headquarters, something prior FBI directors and Congress acknowledged needed to be done because of the decrepit condition of the building.

“I didn't know that I was going to do this, but I'm going to announce on your show anyway, this FBI is leaving the Hoover building because this building is unsafe for our workforce,” Patel said, surprising Deputy Director Dan Bongino, who was at his side for the interview. “But 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.”

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: FBI moving 1,500 personnel from Washington, closing storied headquarters