Kash Patel, accused of skipping office frequently, says he's moving FBI headquarters

Indian-origin FBI director Kash Patel, who was recently accused of skipping office most days and working from home, revealed that he is planning to relocate 1,500 agents out of the Hoover building for safety reasons.

In an exclusive interview with Fox News that will air this Sunday, Patel said the headquarters is unsafe for the workforce. "This FBI is leaving the Hoover building because this building is unsafe for our workforce and we want… the American men and women to know, if you're going to come work at the premier law enforcement agency in the world, we're going to give you a building that's commensurate with that, and that's not this place," Patel said in the preview of the interview that was released on Friday.Recently, Patel was on the radar for his use of FBI jets for private trips which is the only way the FBI director is allowed to travel but questions were raised as to whether he was reimbursing for the many private tours that he made. A former FBI official claimed Patel is spotted more at nightclubs and less at the office. Some reports citing FBI insiders claimed Patel apparently has no interest in FBI -- he cancelled the daily morning meeting and made it twice a week, and did away with the weekly telecall with the leaders of the FBI field officers.

Patel's staff said it was a malicious campaign, and Kash Patel's work speaks for themselves. He changed the meeting schedule not to fit his convenience but for safety reasons, they said. Now this safety issue is at the forefront with the FBI headquarters moving out of its decades-old address of decades. "Look, the FBI is 38,000 when we're fully manned, which we're not. In the national capital region, in the 50-mile radius around Washington, DC, there were 11,000 FBI employees," Patel said.

"That's like a third of the workforce. A third of the crime doesn't happen here, so we're taking 1,500 of those folks and moving them out.""Every state's getting a plus-up, and I think when we do things like that, we inspire folks in America to become intel analysts and agents and say, 'we want to go work at the FBI because we want to go fight violent crime, and we want to get sent out into the country to do it,'" Patel added. "That's what we're doing in the next three, six, nine months we're going to do that hard."

Where will FBI's new headquarters be?

The options are being weighed in by the FBI and the Government Services Administration. Locations news DC in Maryland and Virginia were earlier explored. The search for a new headquarters is not new and in late 2023, the GSA chose a site in Greenbelt, Maryland, that could serve as the main headquarters. But those attempts did not fructify earlier.