Christopher Wray’s comments could have serious implications for a long-awaited plan whose announcement seemed to mark the end of a hotly contested debate over the past decade.
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Greenbelt, Md., was picked as the location for the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s new headquarters.
Christopher A. Wray, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, on Thursday blasted the Biden administration’s selection of Greenbelt, Md., for the bureau’s new headquarters, citing a flawed process and suggesting that a top federal official had a conflict of interest.
Mr. Wray’s efforts to cast doubt on the selection could have serious implications for a long-awaited plan whose announcement late Wednesday seemed to mark the end of a decade-long bureaucratic scrum.
In an unusually blunt rebuke of the Biden administration, Mr. Wray claimed that officials with the General Services Administration, which oversees the management and development of federal properties, demanded that the F.B.I. relocate to suburban Maryland, even though an alternative site in Springfield, Va., scored better on a checklist of selection criteria.
“I had hoped this message would include our enthusiastic support for the way G.S.A. arrived at its selection,” Mr. Wray said in a statement. “Unfortunately, we have concerns about fairness and transparency in the process and G.S.A.’s failure to adhere to its own site selection plan.”
Robin Carnahan, the General Services Administration administrator, shot back with a statement of her own, accusing Mr. Wray of making “inaccurate claims directed” at her employees.
But Mr. Wray’s comments were clearly unwelcome news, and he pointedly reminded the administration that Congress, not Mr. Biden’s political appointees, control “the next steps” in the approval process.
Gov. Glenn Youngkin of Virginia joined a bipartisan group of the state’s House members in calling the decision “irrevocably undermined and tainted” and demanded that the plan to be abandoned.
Lawmakers in Virginia and Maryland have fought for years over where the F.B.I.’s headquarters should be. And while Mr. Wray acknowledged he does not have direct control of the decision-making process, he does have significant political leverage. House Republicans could seize on his doubts to hold up funding or demand changes.
The sprawling campus would be built near the Greenbelt Metro station as part of a larger multiuse development under the G.S.A. proposal. It would replace the crumbling J. Edgar Hoover Building in downtown Washington, which is sheathed in netting to shield passers-by from falling concrete.
The bureau will maintain a smaller office in downtown Washington, with about 1,000 employees, a senior law enforcement official said.
For months, F.B.I. officials privately expressed their concerns about the process of developing the site, while claiming they were not inherently opposed to moving outside Washington or thumbing the scale for the Northern Virginia suburbs, where many employees live.
Mr. Wray, who was appointed by President Donald J. Trump in 2017 after he fired James B. Comey, said that an unnamed senior official with the General Services Administration overruled a site selection panel in picking the Greenbelt site over the Springfield location.
The Greenbelt parcel includes other lots owned by the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, which runs the region’s Metro rail system.
The bureau “raised a serious concern about the appearance of a lack of impartiality,” given that the official worked as a top administrator for the authority before going to G.S.A., he wrote.
Mr. Wray said the official’s conduct, “while not inherently inappropriate, is exceedingly rare.”
The official Mr. Wray referred to is Nina M. Albert, a former vice president for the transit authority who served as G.S.A.’s director of real estate until last month, when she left to become the acting deputy mayor for planning and economic development in the District of Columbia, according to people with knowledge of the situation.
Ms. Albert, who has overseen several large redevelopment projects in the Washington region, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
A senior G.S.A. official said that Ms. Albert was exhaustively screened by the agency’s ethics experts before being given the assignment — and that G.S.A.’s leaders overrode the recommendations of subordinates to put Springfield on the list of potential sites in the first place.
“Any suggestion that there was inappropriate interference is unfounded,” Ms. Carnahan said. “We stand behind the process, the decision and all of the public servants who carefully followed the process and made a good decision.”
Leaders in Prince George’s County, one of the largest majority-Black suburbs in the nation, have long pitched the site as a vital economic project. The area offers ample space for expansion and access to public transportation and major highways, they have said, pointing to a highly trained work force and a greater variety of merchants in the area than the somewhat isolated Hoover building.
But a senior official briefed on the process said the choice of Greenbelt was based on other factors, including the availability of the land and the “racial equities” of building in Prince George’s County — a significant factor given the bureau’s reluctance to hire Black agents and improper surveillance of civil rights leaders under Mr. Hoover, its founding director.
In 2018, Mr. Trump scrapped longstanding plans to select a site in either Virginia or Maryland, dating from the Obama administration. At the time, Mr. Trump’s advisers cited a lack of available congressional funding needed to pay the $3 billion cost of building in the suburbs, and the inconvenience associated with relocating about 10,000 employees outside the city.
Instead, the Trump administration proposed rebuilding the headquarters at its existing site and permanently moving more than 2,000 F.B.I. employees to Alabama, West Virginia and other states.
Lawmakers in Maryland and Virginia reversed that reversal after he left office, inserting language into a federal funding bill that revived the plan to move the bureau to the suburbs.
Mr. Trump’s unusual interest in the building (a favorite topic of Oval Office discussion early in his administration) and its proximity to his now defunct hotel across the street from the Hoover building raised eyebrows among some Democrats. They claimed that he wanted to prevent the Hoover site from being redeveloped into a competing project, perhaps another luxury hotel.
After a five-year investigation, the Justice Department’s inspector general determined that the decision was most likely motivated by funding and logistical issues, not by an effort by Mr. Trump to personally intervene to protect his property in downtown Washington from a possible rival.
Several F.B.I. witnesses, including Mr. Wray, told the inspector general that they had been given authority to determine the location of the new headquarters.
They chose to rebuild at the existing location because it would allow them to concentrate their work force in a central location next to the Justice Department, and would cost less, the officials said.
Glenn Thrush covers the Department of Justice. He joined The Times in 2017 after working for Politico, Newsday, Bloomberg News, The New York Daily News, The Birmingham Post-Herald and City Limits. More about Glenn Thrush
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Source: nytimes.com
