(Photo by Beau Finley)

Yet more evidence has emerged that President Donald Trump was involved in the FBI’s decision to scrap its original plan to find a different home for its new agency headquarters, instead opting to raze the crumbling, “functionally obsolete” J. Edgar Hoover Building downtown and build an entirely new headquarters on that site.

For months, Democratic lawmakers have been crying foul about the president’s alleged intervention, because it presents a possible conflict of interest: Trump International Hotel is right across the street from the J. Edgar Hoover Building, meaning that Trump ostensibly has a vested interest in keeping possible commercial competitors off that lot. While his son Donald Trump Jr. is now the head of Trump Old Post Office LLC, the president has not renounced his ownership stake in the company.

New documents provided to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform appear to show for the first time that Trump had a direct influence on the new FBI plan. Emails between officials at the General Services Administration and other government agencies, including GSA Associate Administrator P. Brennan Hart and Daniel Mathews, the Commissioner of the Public Buildings Service at GSA, describe the new raze/rebuild plan as “the project the president wants,” “what POTUS directed everyone to do,” and “direction from the White House.” In one email from Hart sent on January 28, 2018, he says that “GSA is going to hold our ground on the funding source and that it is a demolition/new construction per the President’s instructions.”

Now, the Democrats who sit on the House Oversight Committee have outlined their new findings in a letter to GSA Administrator Emily Murphy, asking for a slew of new documents to further investigate the matter. The committee wants a complete timeline of meetings and discussions between GSA and the FBI regarding the new headquarters starting from January 20, 2017, and all documents/emails between GSA and the White House concerning the FBI headquarters, among other things.

This is not the first inkling that Trump has been involved behind the scenes in the decision to scuttle the five-year search for a new site.

Back in August, a report from the Inspector General of the General Services Administration found that Trump was more involved in the conversations about the new plan than the administration has let on.

According to the report, Murphy failed to disclose a January 24 meeting she had with the president and other officials regarding the FBI headquarters during April testimony she gave to the House Subcommittee on Financial Services and General Government. During that testimony, Murphy was asked whether the White House had been involved in any discussions of the new plan. She said that “the direction that we got came from the FBI,” failing to mention the January 24 meeting. In her response to the IG report, Murphy held that the FBI independently decided on the raze/rebuild plan even before the meeting with the president.

According to the report, Murphy had also met with senior Trump aides on December 20, 2017 to discuss the project, ahead of her January 24 meeting with the president.

The report could not investigate what Trump said or directed during his meetings with Murphy and others on the subject of the headquarters, as the administration did not allow Murphy to speak with the Inspector General about Trump’s statements. But the emails released by House Oversight Committee Democrats appear to show that the raze/rebuild plan came at least partially as a directive from the president after that January 24 meeting.

The relevant emails are all in the days immediately following the two meetings that Murphy did not tell Congress about.

After Murphy met with Trump aides on December 20, Mathews emailed Richard Haley, the assistant director and financial officer of the FBI: “The meeting took an unexpected turn as soon as we got there….we will need to set a phone call between our Administrator and your Director very soon.”

On January 25, a day after the White House meeting, Hart sent an email to Joseph Lai, a special assistant to the president, saying that “the President was briefed yesterday on this by the GSA Administrator … and signed off on this path forward.”

On January 27, Hart emailed the agency’s acting general counsel Jack St. John about “memorializing” the results of the January 24 meeting with Trump: “Ideally I think the [written report of the meeting] would first recap the oval meeting with what POTUS directed everyone to do then ask Emily (GSA) to execute POTUS’s orders.”

The next day, Hart wrote in an email that the agency would be holding its ground on the raze/rebuild plan “per the president’s instructions” (see above). You can view all the relevant emails here.

All of this is relevant because Trump has made public statements about his interest in the FBI building property before. As the Oversight Committee’s letter to Murphy notes, Trump told the Washington Post back in 2013 that he was considering buying the FBI headquarters.

“We’ll be watching the FBI as to what’s going to happen,” Trump said at the time. “Whether or not we will bid on it, we may, we may not. Now if we do as good a job as we will do with [the Old Post Office], people may ask us about it.” (The Old Post Office is the building the Trump Organization leases from the GSA to house the Trump International Hotel).

Trump made these statements to the Post less than a year after the FBI first announced its intention to leave the site and build a new headquarters elsewhere, according to the report.

Once Trump became president, he became ineligible to purchase the land due to federal contracting rules, according to the letter from the oversight committee. “At that point, his position on whether the FBI should abandon the property reportedly changed,” the letter reads.

Indeed, Axios reported in July that Trump believes the headquarters should stay where it is. “This is a great address. They need to stay there. But it needs a total revamp,” he reportedly said. “Honestly, I think it’s one of the ugliest buildings in the city.”

Previously:
New Report Finds That Trump Was Involved In Plans To Keep The FBI Building Across From His Hotel
Other D.C. Brutalist Buildings Trump Would Probably Hate If They Were Across From His Hotel
Feds Cancel Five-Year Search For New FBI Headquarters