Kash Patel has vowed to drastically reshape the F.B.I., but whether that threat is real or just bombast remains unknown unless and until he is confirmed as the ninth director of the bureau.
Some of those promises are already underway, including gutting the bureau’s headquarters and scattering special agents to field offices around the country.
“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,” a podcast. “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.”
Former officials say a much small number of agents and support staff members work at the actual building. However, they widely supported the idea of sending more agents into the field to support operations where offices were understaffed.
The bureau has long planned to reduce the footprint of its headquarters and move employees to an expansive campus in Huntsville, Ala. A senior F.B.I. official referred to it in 2023 as the bureau’s “unofficial second headquarters.”
Already 2,000 employees work at the sprawling installation, and the F.B.I. says an additional 3,000 could be there by the end of the decade.
But Mr. Patel’s plans could also clash with President Trump’s desire to build a new headquarters in downtown Washington, rather than in Maryland or Virginia, which have fought for years to have the agency be based there. Last year, Mr. Trump wrote on social media that it should be in Washington and was going to be the “centerpiece of my plan to totally renovate and rebuild our capital city.
In his book “Government Gangsters,” Mr. Patel said he would slash the general counsel’s office at the F.B.I., which provides critical legal advice to the bureau and the director. That office has “far exceeded its authority,” Mr. Patel said, claiming, with no evidence, that it had taken on “prosecutorial decision-making.”
One of Mr. Patel’s biggest complaints about the F.B.I. and the Justice Department is that it failed to provide documents to congressional oversight committees. Mr. Patel has said Congress should withhold funding if agencies do not comply with such requests.
“When the deep state resists, Congress must force their hand,” Mr. Patel wrote in his book.
It is unclear whether Mr. Patel will hold himself to the same standard if Democrats ask for sensitive documents on his watch.
Mr. Patel has also proposed altering the bureau’s intelligence division that was created after the Sept. 11 attacks.
“The biggest problem the F.B.I. has had has come out of its intel shops,” he said recently. “I’d break that component out of it.”
Intelligence analysts provide both tactical and strategic analysis to help the F.B.I. identify threats, inform decision-making and avoid surprises. The intelligence division also provides key briefings to the director and other bureau leaders, and its information can be included in the president’s daily book of threats to the country.
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