Well, that didn't take long. Barely two days after the GSA announced it had snatched the new FBI HQ prize away from Maryland, a gentleman from Maryland has pointed out a certain security vulnerability with the Reagan Building.
“I think there are enough Republicans who don’t want to put the safety of the men and women of the FBI at risk,” [Maryland Senator Chris] Van Hollen said. “The reason that the three prior sites were under consideration was because they all met the security and setback requirements to ensure the safety of the men and women at the FBI. It was determined years ago that in order to ensure their safety now into the future, you needed a campus like the CIA has at Langley, like the NSA has out at Fort Meade.”
See the WTOP news story here, Maryland delegation vows to fight FBI’s move to new DC location ‘with every tool we have’
So long as the physical security interests of the FBI align with the financial interests of Maryland political players, we can depend on having some elected officials taking up the security banner. So public spirited of them!
Well played, Van Hollen. There is a whole lot of development money in this pot, and the security card might just be a winning hand.
Virginia Senator Mark Warner, how are you going to come back from this?
Amidst the current contention over immigration enforcement - and I fully agree that every order of removal should be enforced - we can lose empathy for the human factor that motivated most (but not all) of those who crossed our borderline.
All the intending economic migrants who didn't follow our immigration law. The "persons not lawfully present" in the USA, to use the last administration's softer terminology for illegal aliens.
Even my flinty heart is touched by the lyrics of the great song "Across the Borderline," and if I could I'd make it mandatory listening for our immigration enforcers.
It's been covered by everybody from Willy Nelson to Bob Dylan and in a lot of different styles, but only the Tejano style sounds exactly right.
We can enforce the law and also appreciate that "hope remains when pride is gone, and it keeps you moving on, calling you across the borderline."
That building cannot met some key security standards that apply to an FBI HQ. Either this idea is a nonstarter or someone will have to approve a waiver. https://t.co/xyS869sl6y
So the latest twist in the very long saga of how we'll replace the Hoover Building has come out of the blue: move the FBI into the very large and pretty modern Reagan Building in the Federal Triangle, formerly the HQ of the Agency for International Development.
The Reagan Building was one of the late Senator Moynihan's pet projects, after he took a big interest in federal architecture. The less said about his taste for woo-woo design over physical security the better, I say, but that's a topic for another day.
I think the selection of the Reagan Building for the FBI is very misguided because the building has a big security deficiency, and it is one that cannot be made better by any renovation or upgrade project.
What critical feature is it that the building lacks? Hint: it rhymes with "get-back."
For thirty years now the USG has had an Interagency Security Committee which creates and enforces security standards for domestic federal civilian office premises. Those standards are not dissimilar to the famously onerous ones that govern our imposing Fortress Embassies abroad, only they are toned down to what the ISC figures is pertinent to domestic threats.
Moreover, those standards are linked to facility security levels which are derived from several criteria. A building such as the FBI headquarters checks all the boxes for a very high facility security level.
If there is a shortfall between the level of security that the ISC requires of an FBI HQ and what the Reagan Building can deliver, well, then, it looks like some responsible official will have to stick his neck out by taking accountability for that shortfall.
I look forward to an epic display of buck-passing when that reality sinks in to the small circle of officials who are senior enough to sign on that dotted line.
New: Widespread RIFs/layoffs could come to the State Department as soon as Friday, though one source notes the department is expected to wait for a Supreme Court ruling on its reorganization plan (which is expected imminently) -https://t.co/Q4oDIFNvTQ
As you've surely seen by now, today's Supreme Court decision in a pertinent case has paused, at least for a little while, the RIFs that were heavily rumored to take place today. Will they take place next week instead? Maybe.
The OPSEC fans among us, looking for observables and indicators, noticed that most of the large conference rooms at HST and Rosslyn annexes - where processing of RIF'ed employees would be likely to take place - were reserved today.
I, personally, was headed to an early morning meeting today in a large conference room in SA-6 when I noticed that the meeting venue had been changed to another building at the last minute. It made me feel a chill as if the Angel of Death were circling over my good friends in OBO.
Don't give in to despair. Wait and see, and be assured that the worst is usually not as bad as you'd imagined it would be.
The new Director of Overseas Buildings Operations has been announced, and I freely admit that he leaves me perplexed.
First, he's not a construction guy. No construction experience at all, but lots of bankruptcy and restructuring work. That's quite odd, especially given that a Trump Administration must be full of construction people, or so you’d think.
But worse is that he comes from a senior position at Teneo, which is the money-grubbing arm of the Clinton Foundation and Bill Clinton’s personal financial benefactor.
Teneo's website still identifies James Feltman this way:
James (Jim) has more than three decades of experience leading fiduciary and restructuring matters, as well as providing clients with key litigation support and expert witness testimony. As an advisor, Jim has worked primarily on debtor side assignments.
What's up with that? Is Trump putting OBO in receivership? My good friends in OBO didn't do anything to earn that.
About Teneo, here's a typical news story about its cozy arrangement with the Clintons. Notice that the story comes from NPR and uses Wikileaks stolen email as its sourcing, so it has an impeccable left-side political pedigree despite the content. (So, that means if you dislike the info or the tone, I’ll assume you’re wearing a MAGA hat!)
A newly revealed memo from a former aide to Bill Clinton details substantial overlap between donors to the nonprofit Clinton Foundation and the former president's personal financial activities, a $30 million-plus enterprise described in the memo as "Bill Clinton, Inc."
Money managers UBS and Barclays, mining giant BHP, and the for-profit educational company Laureate International Universities each made substantial payments to Bill Clinton for speeches or "advisory services," while also contributing to the Clinton Foundation.
Most of these payments were brokered by Doug Band, who served as a personal aide to Bill Clinton during his White House years, and later as a chief fundraiser for the Clinton Foundation.
- Snip -
[Teneo founder] Band's memo also documents the interlocking relationship between the Clinton Foundation's corporate contributors, Teneo clients and Bill Clinton's personal wealth.
- Snip -
Band estimated that he'd helped to secure work for the former president that yielded more than $30 million in personal profit between when Clinton left office in 2001 and when the memo was drafted in 2011, with another $66 million in the pipeline at the time.
That is a very strange background for a Trump Admin official. We'll see more from him soon, so we can hope for the best, but prepare for the worse.
🚨#BREAKING: Protesters and rioters are now using hammers to break apart cement blocks near the Los Angeles detention center where ICE is holding over 40 undocumented immigrants. Tear gas and flash bangs are now being deployed by riot police video by @AnthonyCabassa_pic.twitter.com/sYuJIraE9Y
Back in the long-ago year of 1995 the U.S. government took a good look at the vulnerability of civilian federal office buildings to physical attack. (Read the report here.) In brief, the task force that researched and prepared the report recommended that the USG adopt a set of physical security standards that were closely modeled on the standards the State Department had created ten years earlier for overseas embassies.
Only, the overseas standards were thought to not be pertinent in all respects to the domestic threat environment, especially not to the threat of mob violence. After all, we'd had a large vehicle-borne bomb in the Oklahoma City attack, and that certainly looked exactly like overseas terrorism, but we hadn't had large mobs or other civil disturbances against domestic federal buildings in a very long time. [Pro Tip: look up the history of the 1919 General Steel Strike and the declaration of martial law in Gary, Indiana.]
So there was no need for our modern domestic building standards to require perimeter walls, forced-entry resistance, safe havens, or other such counter-mob defenses. That was just reasonable risk management.
Well, that reasoning was also from a very long time ago, and it no longer seems to apply to our new domestic threat environment. For instance, the ongoing riots against immigration enforcement in Los Angeles.
Speaking of which, check out that video above of a protestor banging away with a hand tool at concrete anti-ram bollards - which are a countermeasure against vehicle threats - in front of an ICE detention center.
Why was he doing that, you may wonder? Maybe because he wanted to create a pile of concrete shards that his fellow protestors could fling at the detention center. Or, just as likely, for no good reason at all but simply because it was a riot and he wanted to do something mindless and destructive.
Whatever his reason, he kind of perfectly exemplifies the contemporary threat to domestic federal civilian buildings, and it is something that our current facility security standards do not begin to counter adequately.
My prediction: you may expect to see hasty walls and fences going up around your local government buildings in the short term, and proposals for costly forced-entry facade upgrades in the mid and long term.
First of all, hey! New York Post, please look up the definition of "commiserate" because I'm pretty sure the new FBI Director actually said "commensurate," which is the word that makes sense in that context.
OTOH, anyone with a heart can commiserate with those who have to work in or even drive past that edifice of architectural overreach that is the J. Edgar Hoover Building. It was the most expensive government office building ever built in DC - yes, even more costly than the Pentagon - when it was completed in the 1970s - but it's already completely shot, dysfunctional, and not by any stretch physically secure.
It has only one thing going for it, and that is location. It's next to the beautiful Art Deco Justice Department building, which is exactly where a BUREAU of the Justice Department should be if it is to be fully functional. And location is the overwhelmingly important factor in any real estate deal.
For the FBI is, literally, the Bureau of Investigation of the Justice Department, one of a number of bureaus that report to the Attorney General, and not / not a separate government agency no matter how much it pretends to be the later.
Something else the FBI is not is a national police force. The federal government has very little to do with policing violent crime or indeed most other types of crime. Those remain a local and state responsibility. When Kash Patel says he plans to spread most of the FBI staff out around the country to fight crime, he is walking down the empire-building path of J. Edgar Hoover, which ought to be alarming in this MAGA administration.
I would have expected The Trumpening to put the FBI back into its administrative box in DOJ, not to achieve Hoover's old gangbusters dream. (By the way, has it ever occurred to you that there is nothing more absurd than an accountant with an assault weapon? It does to me whenever I see FBI agents in Studly Wear and Theatrics - SWaT - costume.)
There is one clear and rational path forward if the Administration and Congress are finally serious about replacing the Hoover Building, and that is to demolish the building and replace it with a smaller one on the same site. That would require no new site selection and purchase, would preserve some vital infrastructure that's on the current site, and would make modern facility security requirements achievable.
The only downsides are the need to move FBI offices into swing space for a few years, and that the avoidance of an enormous 3+ billion dollar new construction project elsewhere would make some greedy Virginia and Maryland politicians cry.
Actually, that last one is a plus, not a negative. And so is the first one if the swing space were to be obtained in the former Trump Hotel directly across the street from Hoover's HQ. That hotel is still a GSA property, so far as I know, and it held FBI overflow offices before the Hoover Building was constructed. The FBI would be returning to its roots there.