DOJ Inspector General Pressured by Rep. Cummings to Probe Trump’s Plan for the FBI

The Justice Department inspector general plans to investigate the FBI’s decision to scrap plans to relocate the agency’s headquarters from downtown Washington, D.C., to the city’s suburbs, according to a letter the agency watchdog sent to Congress earlier this week.

The agency watchdog,  Michael E. Horowitz will review the Justice Department and FBI’s “involvement in decisions relating to the possible relocation of FBI Headquarters,” according to the letter the agency sent lawmakers on Tuesday.

The man who has been designated by many law enforcement officers as an untrustworthy, political hack who heads the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Maryland, and also serves as the a member of the House Oversight Committee. He said he and his fellow Democrats are seeking much more information and documents “to determine whether the President is making decisions about the FBI headquarters building based on what is best for the country or what is best for his own financial bottom-line.”

“This guy Cummings is a fake, phony, fraud who knows full well Trump will not benefit from a new headquarters for the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” said former police captain Tom Minot-Davis. “In fact, if Cummings is so keen on investigating the Trump-FBI relationship perhaps he should look at documents that suggest treasonous conduct by upper-echelon Justice Department and FBI leaders during the Obama years in the White House,” Capt. Minot-Davis said.

President Donald Trump inserted himself personally into his administration’s discussion of the fate of the FBI headquarters in downtown Washington near his D.C. hotel, according to new emails released by Democrats Thursday, raising questions about possible conflicts of interest between the government’s actions and the president’s personal business holdings.

Democrats, citing the new documents obtained by the House Oversight Committee, accused General Services Administrator Emily Murphy of misleading Congress about the White House’s involvement in the plans in testimony before a House committee.

The documents “show that a more expensive plan to keep the existing property on Pennsylvania Avenue, demolish the existing building, and construct a new facility on the same site—and thereby prevent commercial developers from competing with the Trump Hotel directly across the street—was approved during a meeting with President Trump at the Oval Office on January 24, 2018,” Democrats wrote Thursday.

The White House denied Cummings and Democratic Party accusations that the President is attempting to influence the real estate decisions about the FBI headquarters building.

“The idea that the reason the president wanted the F.B.I. headquarters to remain in its current location is based on anything other than the recommendation of the F.B.I. is simply false,” Lindsay Walters, a White House spokeswoman told the Trump-despising reporters.

In an email exchange after a January 2018 meeting, General Services Administration (GSA) officials discussed producing a document memorializing the Oval Office conversation.

“Ideally I think it would first recap the oval office meeting with what POTUS directed everyone to do to execute POTUS’s orders,” GSA acting chief of staff P. Brennan Hart wrote in an email on January 27, 2019.