SpyWeek: FBI Evictions, CIA Standoff

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KASH CLEANSE: Major changes are underway at the J. Edgar Hoover building in Washington, D.C. as FBI Director Kash Patel takes over the bureau that he spent eight years criticizing. The Washington Post reported that 1,000 staff and special agents at the Pennsylvania Ave. headquarters were ordered into field offices around the country—and another 500 employees will be relocating to the FBI’s facility in Huntsville, Ala. The biggest changes came hours before Patel took his oath of office. NBC’s Ken Dilanian reported that “before he arrived all the support employees on the seventh floor where the director's office is—I'm talking about executive assistants and people who move the paper around, the bureaucracy—they were all told to pack their desks …They were being reassigned, and they were to be removed from the seventh floor and then when he arrived with his own team the director's suite was sealed off, I'm told, and no one else saw him essentially assuming command."

Hundreds of agents impacted by the transfer decision were on temporary assignment to Washington, the Post reported, and could be sent back to their home field offices. The FBI’s satellite office at Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville already houses centers for training, data analytics, and cyber intelligence. “In 2016, the FBI committed to strategically realigning personnel outside the National Capital Region as part of a new 21st Century Workforce Strategy,” its website says.  There are around 7,300 employees working in the Hoover building, most of them non-agents. 

The Washington Post reported earlier in the week that Patel, finally confirmed by the narrowest-ever margin  for an FBI nominee by far—51-49— may be getting advice from a group of ex-FBI agents who call themselves “The Suspendables.”