Washington (CNN) The Justice Department's inspector general said it will probe a decision to scrap plans to move the FBI headquarters out of Washington to the DC suburbs, a decision that may have benefited President Donald Trump's nearby hotel.

"The OIG is initiating a review that will assess the DOJ's and FBI's planning for a future FBI Headquarters facility," Inspector General Michael Horowitz wrote in a letter to House committee chairmen, including Elijah Cummings of Oversight and Peter DeFazio of Transportation and Infrastructure, both Democrats.

Plans to relocate the FBI from the aging Hoover building had been in the works since at least 2012. Those plans called for giving the prime real estate on Pennsylvania Avenue to a developer in exchange for a discount on construction of the new headquarters elsewhere.

That exchange, or the property's sale, could have resulted in the construction of a hotel to compete with Trump's hotel a block away.

But in 2017 and early 2018, the FBI's new leadership began to reconsider, preferring to instead stay in the nation's capital. Government property managers at the General Services Administration called off the exchange idea, saying the developers who had expressed interest believed the Hoover Building site to be worth less than officials had anticipated.

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