Oregon’s top FBI agent is leaving his post in January for a new intelligence role based in Washington D.C.
Kieran Ramsey, special agent in charge of the FBI’s Portland Field Office, announced this month that he was promoted to an assistant director position in Washington, D.C. to coordinate between the FBI and the broader intelligence community.
“It’s something I didn’t expect at this point in my career,” he said. “In fact, I was probably going to end it here, but the director asked me to go back for this specific opportunity.”
During Ramsey’s three years leading the agency in Oregon, he’s helped oversee the response to domestic extremism and attacks on the electrical grid, the fallout from Portland’s 2020 protests, and the region’s fentanyl crisis.
“We were already doing things to try and combat fentanyl,” Ramsey said of the pressing challenge as he prepares to depart the Oregon office.
He said cartels have flooded communities across Oregon and the country with synthetic drugs as a way to take back control of the drug market from pharmaceutical companies that pushed prescription pills in the early 2000s.
As for the next phase of his career, Ramsey declined to discuss specifics on his new role.
“The U.S. intelligence community is made up of 17 different agencies and there always has to be seamless collaboration and seamless coordination to make sure everyone is seeing the same threat picture,” he said. “There’s a lot of different threats we’re dealing with right now.”
Those threats, he said, are front of mind going into the 2024 presidential election, he said.
“You can see the rhetoric that’s out there,” Ramsey said. “You can see the divisiveness and the lack of civility and the calls for action, and not just calls for action, but calls for violent action — even by public officials, elected officials. That’s scary because it gives the endorsement that it’s OK to do this.”
Ramsey said Oregon’s recent history of political violence should be a concern heading into the contentious presidential election. Those threats are unlikely to decrease as voting day gets closer, he said.
Oregon’s top FBI job will have a temporary leader until the agency selects Ramsey’s successor.
Copyright 2023 Oregon Public Broadcasting.