Donald Trump has been quietly moving his people into key spots within the U.S. government. Acting Attorney General Matt Whitaker was one of the most visible moves on the president’s part. Yet, there was one other person who may have done the country even more damage, and Democrats want it fixed.
Representatives Don Beyer (D-VA) and Ted Lieu (D-CA) sent acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney a letter requesting that he revoke Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner’s security clearance, and for good reason.
They wrote saying, according to The Business Insider:
‘We urge you to immediately revoke the security clearance of Senior White House Advisor Jared Kushner, and to comply with past and future oversight requests from Congress related to security clearances, information security, and other matters of national security.’
Then, the two Democratic representatives accused this administration of hiding information from Congress regarding security clearances:
‘The ongoing refusal of the Administration to abide by longstanding security clearance processes, coupled with its unwillingness to explain its actions to Members of Congress, increasingly seems like a coverup.’
The president plucked Carl Kline from the Pentagon and moved him into a key position, supervising the White House office that approves security clearances. It seems that POTUS’ son-in-law and 30 other people wanted top security clearances but did not qualify for them. Trump made Kline the director of the personnel security office in the Executive Office of the President.
The career individual who received Kushner’s application, gave it an “unfavorable” rating after reviewing the FBI report on him, which is nonpolitical. Then, he passed it on to a supervisor. That supervisor agreed and sent Kushner application on to Kline, who overruled his subordinates determinations and approved the president’s son-in-law for a “top secret” security clearance.
A security clearance attorney Brad Moss said, according to NBC News:
‘No one else gets that kind of treatment. My clients would get body slammed if they did that.’
Kline implemented a whole set of new processes that career employees of the White House office found inappropriate. For example, there were no more credit checks on people applying for security clearances.
Sources told NBC that Kushner decided he wanted an even higher clearance from the CIA, but he was denied. One member of the CIA, who does those clearance, called the White House security division asking how Ivanka’s husband even got a top-secret clearance.
The designation of top-secret clearance means that sharing information in the materials made available to Kushner with American adversaries would result in “exceptionally grave damage to national security.”
CIA spokesperson Timothy Barrett said:
‘The CIA does not comment on individual security clearances.’
Chair of the House Oversight and Reform Committee Representative Elijah Cummings (D-MD) also released a statement. He said that the NBC News report tied right into what he wanted to investigate: Trump’s plant manipulating security clearances:
‘The system is supposed to be a nonpartisan determination of an individual’s fitness to hold a clearance, not an ad hoc approach that overrules career experts to give the president’s family members access to our nation’s most sensitive secrets.’
U.S. national security discovered that there were at least four countries trying to discover ways to manipulate Kushner. They were China, Israel, Mexico, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
Featured image is a screenshot via YouTube.
