FBI Director Sounds Alarm on Biden Appointee Selecting Site Owned by Former Employer for New Bureau HQ

FBI director Christopher Wray and elected leaders in Virginia are calling foul over the decision by a Biden administration political appointee to overrule a unanimous panel recommendation in choosing a Maryland site for the FBI’s new headquarters.

Wray and others are questioning the site selection decision by Nina Albert, who was a Biden-appointed General Services Administration commissioner, because the site she chose for the FBI’s future headquarters in Greenbelt, Md., is owned by the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, her former employer.

Albert, a long-time Washington, D.C., insider, worked in prominent positions for the transit authority for over five years before she was tapped to join the GSA in 2021.

Greenbelt, Md., was officially announced as the site for the new FBI headquarters on Thursday.

In choosing Greenbelt, Albert overruled a three-member panel of lifetime FBI and GSA officials who unanimously concluded that a site in Springfield, Va., would be the best location. Attempts to reach Albert on Friday were unsuccessful.

In an internal message to FBI employees obtained by National Review, Wray expressed concerns about the process a “senior executive” used to choose Greenbelt over Springfield, and about the appearance of a conflict of interest. Wray did not name Albert in his message, but she is the one who signed off on a 38-page document explaining the site-selection process, and people with knowledge of the situation identified her as the decision-maker.

In his message to staff, Wray wrote that “the FBI raised serious concerns about the appearance of a lack of impartiality by the GSA senior executive given the executive’s previous professional affiliation with the owner of the selected site.”

“I had hoped this message would include our enthusiastic support for the way GSA arrived at its selection,” he wrote. “Unfortunately, we have concerns about fairness and transparency in the process and GSA’s failure to adhere to its own selection plan.”

His concerns were echoed in a joint statement by prominent elected Virginia officials: the state’s two Democratic senators, Tim Kaine and Mark Warner, Republican governor Glenn Youngkin, and eight U.S. representatives. They wrote that they are “deeply disturbed to learn that a political appointee at the General Services Administration overruled the unanimous recommendation” of the three-person site-selection panel.

“We have repeatedly condemned political interference in the independent, agency-run site selection process for a new FBI headquarters,” they wrote. “Any fair weighing of the criteria points to a selection of Virginia. It is clear that this process has been irrevocably undermined and tainted, and this decision must now be reversed.”

Representative Gerald Connolly, a Democrat from Fairfax County, Va., outside Washington, D.C., tweeted that the “GSA has shamelessly caved to political pressure, putting blatant politics over the merits and amending the weighting of long-established criteria.”

The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, a regional body, has also received criticism from Fairfax County leaders for what they deem to be its “de facto endorsement” of the Greenbelt site, and a lack of neutrality in the site selection.

After receiving a letter of concern from Wray, the GSA reviewed its own process and determined that “there is no conflict of interest.”

“I remain confident in the prudence and integrity of the staff involved from GSA, and I am satisfied that their analysis and conclusions were made in a fair and reasoned way that adheres to both the letter and spirit of the plan,” GSA administrator Robin Carnahan wrote in a November 3 letter to Wray, denying his request to reopen the site-selection process.

Maryland leaders also have said that they believe the selection process was fair.

The often-controversial work of finding a new home for the FBI has been underway for a decade. The FBI’s current complex was completed in the mid-1970s and is literally crumbling — netting on the façade prevents broken concrete from falling on people.

Over the summer, the three-person site-selection panel, composed of two GSA officials and one FBI official, was tasked with ranking three proposed sites for the new headquarters — the Greenbelt and Springfield sites, as well as a third site in Landover, Md.

They ranked the sites on five criteria: proximity to mission-related locations; transportation access; development flexibility; promoting sustainable siting and advancing equity; and cost.

“The three panel members reached a unanimous recommendation indicating Springfield, Virginia as the highest rated site,” Wray wrote to FBI staffers.

However, the next step in the process was a review by Albert, who conducted her own evaluation and came to a different conclusion. In the 38-page document explaining her decision, she wrote that she used her “discretion” to inform her overall ratings in each criterion, and also considered “additional information that the Panel could not consider when I thought it relevant for determining which site was most advantageous to the Government.”

She ranked the three sites differently than the panel in terms of transit accessibility, schedule certainty, and equity. She found the Springfield site the least-advantageous in terms of “advancing racial equity” and providing “support for underserved communities through the federal government,” she wrote.

In his message to staff, Wray wrote that “outside information was inserted into the [site-selection] process in a manner which appeared to disproportionately favor Greenbelt, and the justifications for the departures from the panel were varied and inconsistent.” He added that “the result of the senior executive’s one-directional changes was that Greenbelt became the most highly rated site.”

After overruling the panel and selecting Greenbelt over Springfield, Albert left the GSA. In October, she was hired by D.C. mayor Muriel Bowser to lead the administration’s economic-development efforts, including luring the Washington Commanders football team back the city, according to news reports. Her predecessor resigned amid a sexual-harassment scandal.

In an interview with D.C.’s NBC affiliate, Albert vowed to “lead from a position of ethical standard that’s very high.”