Former President Donald Trump said over the weekend that he disagreed with the push by some Republicans to drain the swamp by moving the new FBI headquarters to Alabama, saying that he wanted their new building to go right next to the Department of Justice.
Trump made the remarks during an interview with Maria Bartiromo on Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures” when asked how the FBI should be reformed.
“For example, the Republicans say, ‘take the headquarters out of Washington, make the headquarters in Alabama,'” she said. “Good idea?”
“So, I had a plan to take down the FBI building and build a brand new building in Washington because I think that the FBI should be somewhat close to DOJ if they’re all honest people,” he responded. “You know, I mean, they want to move it to a different state and ‘we’re going to move it to Virginia, build this, you know, thing.’ It was gonna cost, I mean, if you talk about environmentalists, the traffic was massive, etc, etc.”
Bartiromo noted that the FBI wants nearly $4 billion for the new facility which could end up being bigger than the Pentagon.
“They want it to be this monster building very far away,” he said. “I liked the idea of it being close to the Justice Department, because they work together, to me, and they had the land and they had everything. You could renovate the building or build a new building in that location, there’d be a little bit of turmoil during construction, but not a lot. And that was what I preferred. That’s what I was going to do. And it would have cost a lot less money. But I like the FBI being somewhat close to the Department of Justice. I think it was, and I will tell you, the FBI people felt that was good also.”
Trump later added that while he loved Alabama he thinks the building needs to be next to the DOJ.
“I think there’s something to be said about the FBI, and the Department of Justice or injustice,” he said. “Right now, it’s not the department, it’s the department of injustice. I think they have to be, you know, they work together, they could walk across the street. So every time you have to meet somebody in court or whatever you’re doing, they have to ride an hour and a half or two hours in traffic from a place in Virginia that’s very far away.”
WATCH:
Donald Trump to @MariaBartiromo on calls to move the FBI to Alabama @SundayFutures pic.twitter.com/cVK8JZEF76
— SundayMorningFutures (@SundayFutures) July 16, 2023