WASHINGTON: The Federal Bureau of Investigation on Friday ordered the transfer of 1,500 staffers out of its Washington headquarters, two sources familiar with the orders told Reuters.
\nSome 1,000 of the staffers would be dispersed to field offices around the country, with another 500 ordered to transfer to Huntsville, Alabama, the sources said, adding that the news was conveyed to employees at a Friday meeting.
\nAn FBI spokesperson did not have immediate comment.
\nThe bureau had 9,414 employees in Washington as of June 2024, with 37,478 nationwide, according to figures kept by the federal government. FBI Director Kash Patel was sworn into his new role on Friday, the day after the Senate confirmed him as US President Donald Trump\u2019s choice in a 51-49 vote with two Republicans voting no, expressing concern about Patel\u2019s past political advocacy and its potential effect on the FBI\u2019s law enforcement mission.
\n\u201cI promise you the following: there will be accountability within the FBI and outside of the FBI, and we will do it through rigorous constitutional oversight starting this weekend,\u201d Patel said after being sworn in. Patel takes charge as the Trump administration seeks to put their stamp on the FBI and its parent agency, the Justice Department, challenging decades-old traditions of independence and reorienting its mission toward Trump\u2019s core priorities.
\nAt least 75 career Justice Department lawyers and FBI officials, who normally keep their roles from administration to administration, have either resigned, been fired or stripped of their posts in the first month of the Trump administration.
\nPatel telegraphed his plans for the shakeup in his book \u201cGovernment Gangsters,\u201d where he proposed moving the FBI\u2019s headquarters out of Washington D.C. to prevent \u201cinstitutional capture and curb FBI leadership from engaging in political gamesmanship.\u201d
\nPatel has said he will increase the FBI\u2019s role in countering illegal immigration and violent crime, top Trump priorities, by \u201cletting good cops be cops.\u201d He has said he will scale back investigative work at the FBI\u2019s Washington headquarters where many counterintelligence, national security and public corruption probes are housed.
\nThe FBI has an office in Huntsville, Alabama at Redstone Arsenal, a US Army post that also houses Department of Defense and NASA offices.
\nPatel has been among the biggest boosters of claims that a \u201cdeep state\u201d within the government has pursued Trump in an attempt to sink his political prospects.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
WASHINGTON: The Federal Bureau of Investigation on Friday ordered the transfer of 1,500 staffers out of its Washington headquarters, two sources familiar with the orders told Reuters. Some 1,000 of the staffers would be dispersed to field offices around the country, with another 500 ordered to transfer to Huntsville, Alabama, the sources said, adding that …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":77454,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-77437","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77437","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=77437"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77437\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":77455,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77437\/revisions\/77455"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/77454"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=77437"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=77437"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=77437"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}