by Victor Davis Hanson
The long-overdue shuttering of the FBI’s scandal-scarred Washington headquarters signals not just a change of address, but a necessary exile of the agency’s most politically corrupted core.
Current FBI Director Kash Patel is closing down the agency’s Washington, DC, mothership office and moving at least 1,500 employees out of the DC area to regional offices.
The decision was not just Patel’s.
During the Biden Administration, it was determined that the 50-year-old Hoover building headquarters was structurally decrepit. More germanely, no prior FBI director had ever explained why nearly a third of the FBI workforce was centered in offices in Washington, far from where most of the serious crime in America occurs.
The news is welcome for reasons well beyond the safety of agents in an apparently unsafe headquarters.
It is no exaggeration to state that most of the FBI scandals of the last decade were born in the Hoover building headquarters, suggesting that the agency had long become top-heavy, politically weaponized, and deeply embedded in and compromised by the Washington apparat.
Former FBI Director, later appointed as special counsel, Robert Mueller ran a media-driven, 20-month, 40-million-dollar legal circus chasing the unicorn of “Russian collusion.” His left-wing legal team—replete with political conflicts of interest and scrubbed cell phones—was dubbed by the obsequious, giddy left-wing media as the “army,” “untouchables,” “all-stars,” “dream team,” and “hunter-killer teams.”
When called to testify about his investigation that had found no Russian-Trump collusion, Mueller implausibly denied any knowledge of the Steele dossier or FusionGPS. Yet they were arguably the very catalysts for his own special counsel appointment.
Two of his Washington FBI investigators were fired—the amorous Peter Strzok and Lisa Page—who had co-texted a deep personal antipathy toward Trump, the object of their investigations, and a desire to see him not become president, referred to as an “insurance policy.” Note that either the FBI or Mueller’s team also mysteriously lost the requested recorded texts and calls on the duo’s phones.
Mueller’s successor, James Comey, outdid his predecessor’s congressionally sworn amnesia. Now in the news yet again for allegedly threatening the president with an “8647” tweet, Comey, while under oath to a congressional committee, stonewalled questioning by claiming he did not remember or could not answer on some 245 separate occasions.
Somehow in 2016, Comey—suddenly acting as both an investigator and a de facto federal prosecutor, despite clear conflicts of interest—managed to interfere in the 2016 campaign by finding Hillary Clinton likely guilty of, but somehow not indictable for, a number of felonies, from unlawfully transmitting classified files to destroying subpoenaed evidence.
Comey also lied to the president that he was not a subject of his own ongoing FBI-directed investigation of Trump.
Comey hired Christopher Steele as an informant and thereby helped to birth Steele’s fabrications.
Comey, through a friend, leaked to the New York Times his own private conversations with the president, recorded on his own FBI device no less.
He set up National Security Advisor Michael Flynn and bragged about how easily the naive and ambushed Flynn foolishly spoke to his FBI investigators without an attorney.
His successor, interim director Andrew McCabe, was a kindred leaker and political partisan. He was fired for lying to federal investigators on four occasions, three times while under oath.
McCabe’s successor, Christopher Wray, infamously oversaw FBI agents spying on parents at school board meetings and supposedly also monitoring “radical traditionalist” Catholics.
Wray’s FBI conducted the now equally discredited Mar-a-Lago SWAT team raid on ex-President Trump’s personal residence. The performance-art operation was supposedly designed to find rumored mountains of improperly stored classified files. Despite all the leaks and fake news about troves of secret and classified dossiers, in the end, agents carted away 13,000 documents to find a mere 102 that were deemed classified—some .007 percent of what they confiscated.
In a now-infamous photo of the document trove released by the FBI, Trump’s classified papers were haphazardly strewn across the floor with nearby covers emblazoned “Secret” in red rubrics.
Agents later admitted the photos did not reflect the actual position of the documents when they had arrived, but were scattered over the floor and photographed by the FBI, along with the covers that they had brought along to the raid as photo props.
The FBI then showed far less interest in investigating Joe Biden’s three-decade-long illegal possession of classified documents, stored in at least three unsecured locations—and only revealed when the Biden White House had appointed a special counsel to investigate Trump for what Biden himself had done for far longer, with less security and with continued impunity.
Washington FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith was indicted and convicted of doctoring a FISA application document in order to deceive the federal court into granting surveillance over an innocent but framed Carter Page.
FBI chief counsel James A. Baker, likewise Washington-based, allegedly was deeply involved in trying to shop the spurious Steele dossier to the media on the eve of the 2016 election.
In general, the Washington FBI sought to warp both the 2016 and 2020 elections and might arguably have affected either outcome. Besides finding Hillary Clinton likely culpable and then improperly exonerating her, later in 2020, the FBI sat tight and silent on the Hunter Biden laptop after authenticating it as genuine.
Yet almost at the same time, kindred ex-intelligence authorities—the now notorious “51 former intelligence officials” —rounded up by former CIA interim director Mike Morrell at the prompt of then Biden aide and soon-to-be Secretary of State Antony Blinken—brazenly lied to the public that the laptop was a likely creation of Russian intelligence.
This disinformation campaign, launched by the 51 “former” intelligence agents, included some who were still on the federal payroll as contractors. Their intent was to arm Joe Biden in the upcoming October 2020 presidential debate with the lie that the incriminating laptop (again confirmed in secret by the FBI as genuine) was fabricated by the Russians. And the ruse worked perfectly in deceiving the American people on the eve of the election.
Note as well that the FBI embedded agents in social media concerns like Facebook and Twitter to partner in censoring news by deeming it “misinformation” and “disinformation.” Yet, in truth, their jobs in the so-called “Twitter Files” scandal were better defined as suppressing any news considered problematic to the then-2020 Biden campaign.
Many FBI agents later rotated over to high-paying social media companies after their collaboration, among them former FBI general counsel Baker, who was then subsequently fired by the new owner of Twitter, Elon Musk.
The list of ethical, moral, and legal misadventures at the top-heavy Washington FBI office could be easily expanded.
But suffice to say, the closure of the J. Edgar Hoover building and the dispersal of the toxic Washington-centric FB hierarchy is welcome news.
Hopefully, this historic closure will also mark the end of the most
sordid and decade-long chapter in the history of a once-great agency.
Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness and the
Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover
Institution. He is an American military historian, columnist, a former
classics professor, and scholar of ancient warfare. He has been a
visiting professor at Hillsdale College since 2004, and is the 2023
Giles O'Malley Distinguished Visiting Professor at the School of Public
Policy, Pepperdine University. Hanson was awarded the National
Humanities Medal in 2007 by President George W. Bush, and the Bradley
Prize in 2008. Hanson is also a farmer (growing almonds on a family farm
in Selma, California) and a critic of social trends related to farming
and agrarianism.
He is the author of the just released New York Times best seller, The End of Everything: How Wars Descend into Annihilation, published by Basic Books on May 7, 2024, as well as the recent The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won, The Case for Trump, and The Dying Citizen.
Source: https://amgreatness.com/2025/05/19/the-fbi-washington-headquarters-wont-be-missed/
