The latest White House flap over resigned wife abuser Rob Porter has once again put a spotlight on the Trump administration’s serial malfeasance surrounding security clearances. Similar to any repeat offender, it hasn’t happened just once. Porter is just the latest example of someone who likely shouldn’t have been viewing classified materials because he was at risk of being blackmailed. In fact, in Porter’s case, the FBI wouldn’t even grant him a permanent security clearance and yet he had been viewing classified materials on a temporary clearance for over a year. But Porter wasn’t alone, writes Politico:
White House chief of staff John Kelly was told several weeks ago that the FBI would recommend denying full security clearances to multiple White House aides who had been working in the West Wing on interim security clearances.
So how many other White House aides continue to work on temporary clearances? “Dozens,” according to the Washington Post. Kelly had reportedly planned to fire anyone who hadn’t been cleared for a permanent clearance but, then again, he also lobbied Porter to stay after his history of abuse went public, so who knows?
What’s almost certain, though, is that more people continue to work within the West Wing who absolutely should not be viewing classified materials and yet they do. The troubling pattern began, first and foremost, with a guy who held the most sensitive intelligence post that exists in the White House: former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who has since resigned and pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI.
Flynn was placed in that post even after the transition team was informed that he had been working as a foreign agent for Turkey and was under FBI investigation for it. That doesn’t even cover what the White House may have known about his communications with Russia.
Then there’s Jared Kushner who, along with attending the Trump Tower meeting in June of 2016 that promised to yield Russian “dirt” on Hillary Clinton, has had to routinely amend his own security clearance “dozens” of times, according to Newsweek.