Justice Department watchdog to investigate decision to cancel FBI headquarters plan
By Jonathan O'Connell July 3 at 9:00 AM
The Justice Department’s inspector general will investigate the FBI’s role in dropping plans a decade in the making to move its headquarters to the Washington suburbs, he told Congress in a letter Tuesday.
The inspector general, Michael E. Horowitz, told House committee leaders that he is initiating a review of actions at the DOJ and FBI that led to the canceling of the plans in favor of building a smaller replacement for the J. Edgar Hoover Building downtown and dispersing other FBI staff elsewhere.
The review could produce new revelations about the Trump administration’s stunning reversal of bipartisan plans for the development of a new, highly secure campus that would have gotten the bureau out of the fast-deteriorating Hoover building.
Democratic leaders of two committees, Elijah E. Cummings (Md.) and Gerald E. Connolly (Va.) of the Oversight Committee and Peter A. DeFazio (Ore.) and Dina Titus (Nev.) of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, have pressed Horowitz to investigate. They redoubled their efforts after the head of the General Services Administration was found by her agency’s inspector general to have misled Congress about the White House’s involvement in the decision-making.
Democrats allege that Trump used the decision to put his own financial interests ahead of the needs of the FBI and taxpayers, which administration officials deny. The GSA is the landlord to Trump’s D.C. hotel, located just down the street from the Hoover building, and redeveloping the Hoover site could introduce a new hotel competitor. Trump also told The Washington Post before running for office that he was considering bidding for the FBI project as well.
Under Trump, the FBI and GSA have both resisted responding to document requests made by Democrats on the Hill.
“For months, our Committees have investigated the Administration’s sudden change of heart on a federal property across the street from the President’s namesake hotel, but because the FBI has withheld key decision-making documents from Congress, we have been left with many unanswered questions,” the House committee leaders said in a statement.
more:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/justice-department-watchdog-to-investigate-decision-to-cancel-fbi-headquarters-plan/2019/07/03/76971d76-9d85-11e9-9ed4-c9089972ad5a_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.345ffd131907
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