F.B.I. Director Casts Doubt on Decision to Relocate Its Headquarters to Maryland

Christopher A. Wray, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, on Thursday blasted the Biden administration’s selection of Greenbelt, Md., for the bureau’s new headquarters, citing a flawed process and suggesting a top federal official had a conflict of interest.

Mr. Wray’s efforts to cast doubt on the selection could have serious implications for a long-awaited plan whose announcement late Wednesday seemed to mark the end of a decade-long bureaucratic scrum.

In an unusually blunt rebuke of the Biden administration, Mr. Wray claimed that officials with the General Services Administration, which oversees the management and development of federal properties, demanded that the F.B.I. relocate to suburban Maryland, even though an alternative site in Springfield, Va., scored better on a checklist of selection criteria.

“I had hoped this message would include our enthusiastic support for the way G.S.A. arrived at its selection,” Mr. Wray said in a statement. “Unfortunately, we have concerns about fairness and transparency in the process and G.S.A.’s failure to adhere to its own site selection plan.”

Lawmakers in Virginia and Maryland have fought for years over where the F.B.I.’s headquarters should be. And while Mr. Wray acknowledged he does not have direct control of the decision-making process, he does have significant political leverage, especially with House Republicans, who could hold up funding for the project.

Mr. Wray pointedly reminded the administration that Congress controls “the next steps.”

The sprawling campus would be built near the Greenbelt Metro station as part of a larger multiuse development under the G.S.A. proposal. It would replace the crumbling J. Edgar Hoover Building in downtown Washington, which is sheathed in netting to shield passers-by from falling concrete.

The bureau will maintain a smaller office in downtown Washington, with about 1,000 employees, a senior law enforcement official said.

For months, F.B.I. officials privately expressed their concerns about the process of developing the site, while claiming they were not inherently opposed to moving outside Washington or thumbing the scale for the Northern Virginia suburbs, where many employees live.

Mr. Wray, who was appointed by President Donald J. Trump in 2017 after he fired James B. Comey, said that an unnamed senior official with the General Services Administration overruled a site selection panel in picking the Greenbelt site over the Springfield location.

The Greenbelt parcel includes other lots owned by the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, which runs the region’s Metro rail system.

The bureau “raised a serious concern about the appearance of a lack of impartiality,” given that the official worked as a top administrator for the authority before going to G.S.A., he wrote.

Mr. Wray said the official’s conduct, “while not inherently inappropriate, is exceedingly rare.”

The official Mr. Wray referred to is Nina M. Albert, a former vice president for the transit authority who served as G.S.A.’s director of real estate until last month, when she left to become the acting deputy mayor for planning and economic development in the District of Columbia, according to a person with knowledge of the situation.

Ms. Albert, who has overseen several large redevelopment projects in the Washington region, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. A spokesman for G.S.A. did not immediately respond for a request for comment.

Leaders in Prince George’s County, one of the largest majority-Black suburbs in the nation, have long pitched the site as a vital economic project. The area offers ample space for expansion and access to public transportation and major highways, they have said, pointing to a highly trained work force and a greater variety of merchants in the area than the somewhat isolated Hoover building.

But a senior official briefed on the process said the choice of Greenbelt was based on other factors, including the availability of the land and the “racial equities” of building in Prince George’s County — a significant factor given the bureau’s reluctance to hire Black agents and improper surveillance of civil rights leaders under Mr. Hoover, its founding director.

In 2018, Mr. Trump scrapped longstanding plans to select a site in either Virginia or Maryland, dating from the Obama administration. At the time, Mr. Trump’s advisers cited a lack of available congressional funding needed to pay the $3 billion cost of building in the suburbs, and the inconvenience associated with relocating about 10,000 employees outside the city.

Instead, the Trump administration proposed rebuilding the headquarters at its existing site and permanently moving more than 2,000 F.B.I. employees to Alabama, West Virginia and other states.

Lawmakers in Maryland and Virginia reversed that reversal after he left office, inserting language into a federal funding bill that revived the plan to move the bureau to the suburbs.

Mr. Trump’s unusual interest in the building (a favorite topic of Oval Office discussion early in his administration) and its proximity to his now defunct hotel across the street from the Hoover building raised eyebrows among some Democrats. They claimed that he wanted to prevent the Hoover site from being redeveloped into a competing project, perhaps another luxury hotel.

After a five-year investigation, the Justice Department’s inspector general determined that the decision was most likely motivated by funding and logistical issues, not by an effort by Mr. Trump to personally intervene to protect his property in downtown Washington from a possible rival.

Several F.B.I. witnesses, including Mr. Wray, told the inspector general that they had been given authority to determine the location of the new headquarters.

They chose to rebuild at the existing location because it would allow them to concentrate their work force in a central location next to the Justice Department, and would cost less, the officials said.