Speaking during an appearance on “Mornings with Maria,” a Fox Business show with Maria Bartiromo, FBI Director Kash Patel announced that he would be shutting down the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s J. Edgar Hoover building in DC, fulfilling a pledge he made back when Trump was still the president-elect.
As background, Patel, back in the winter of 2024, shortly after President Trump won the election, appeared on The Shawn Ryan show, one of the top podcasts in America, and told the host, former Navy SEAL Shawn Ryan, that if made FBI Director he would shut down the Hoover Building and turn the FBI employees into crime-fighting cops.
He said, during that podcast appearance, “I’d shut down the FBI Hoover Building on day one and reopen it the next day as a museum of the Deep State. 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.”
Continuing, he noted that there is a great deal of bloat in the bureau’s budget that needs to be trimmed out, saying, “Every agency and department that I’ve ever worked for, when it comes to the fiscal end of the year, they’re like, go on trips, go spend money. What? Just give it back to Congress. We can’t do that.”
As Republicans have been somewhat disillusioned with and disappointed in Patel so far, particularly as the Epstein files haven’t been released, many thought he wouldn’t actually shut the building down as promised, and instead, the eyesore of an office building would remain a stain on Washington, D.C.
But, then he told Maria Bartiromo that it actually will be shut down. Beginning, he explained that the FBI is way too staffed in the DC area, telling her, “Look, the FBI is 38,000 when we’re fully manned, which we’re not, in the National Capital Region, in the 50-mile radius around Washington, DC, there were 11,000 FBI employees. That’s like a third of the workforce. A third of the crime doesn’t happen here.”
Describing how that will be fixed, he said a great many agents will be sent out of DC so that they can fill much-needed supplementary roles in the FBI’s state-level branches. He said, explaining that aspect of the move, “So we’re taking 1500 of those folks and moving them out. Every state is getting a plus-up.”
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Adding to that, he indicated that he thinks draining the FBI from the Swamp will bring a different type of person to the agency, saying, “And I think when we do things like that, we inspire folks in America to become Intel analysts and agents and say, ‘We want to go work at the FBI because we want to go fight violent crime, and we want to get sent out into the country to do it.’ And that’s what they were doing in the next 3-6-9, months, we’re going to do that hard.”
Getting to the part about the Hoover Building, saying it is unsafe and needs to be gotten out of. He said, “And, you know, I didn’t know that I was going to do this, but I’m going to announce it on your show anyway. This FBI is leaving the Hoover Building because this building is unsafe for our workforce.”
Concluding, Patel said that the building should reflect the FBI’s mission, which the Hoover Building does not, saying, “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 did not say if the Hoover Building will be turned into museum of the Deep State.
Watch him here:
Featured image credit: screengrab from the embedded video