Today, Explained - For all eyes only

Episode Date: March 12, 2019

Can't pass an FBI background check? Not a problem. That's the Trump administration's approach to top secret security clearances for some White House officials. Now Democrats are launching an investigation. Vox's Ella Nilsen explains. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

And usually when I call my bank and need them to do me a solid, they just want to charge me a bunch of money for said solid. I'm too lazy to really change that situation. But if you're not, you might want to check out Aspiration. They want to save you money while trying to save the world. I'll tell you about that later. You can download the Aspiration app to open an account today. Democrats control the House, and with that control, they've been launching investigations. Surely you've heard about at least one of them. Mr. Trump is a racist. Another thing they're doing is looking into security clearances,

specifically how the Trump administration has been handing them out, because the Trump administration has been doing things a little differently. Yeah, well, in the White House and, you know, across the federal government, if you are a federal employee or a federal contractor, pretty much everybody needs to go through an application for a security clearance. Ella Nilsson writes about Congress for Vox. So you fill out, I think it's a 127-page form. Doozy. And, yeah, a lot of paperwork. And then you get a background check. You know, if you're a lower level federal employee or contractor, it's going to be done by a different investigative body that doesn't have quite as much power. But if you are, say, a senior White House advisor, your background check is likely going to be conducted by the FBI.

And we should note here that Democrats are kind of zeroing in on how certain people in the White House were granted top secret security clearance. But that's not the only kind of security clearance. It's the highest one, but there are three different levels of security clearances. The lowest one is confidential. The middle one is secret. The highest one is top secret. So for the bulk of this, we're dealing with people with top-secret security clearances. And what do they want to know?

Like every apartment you've ever lived in or like what radical organizations you used to belong to, all that stuff? That and more. Okay. They want to know everything. I mean basically what they're looking for, they're looking for anything that could potentially compromise you if you are handling the most classified U.S. state secrets. So they're looking for, I mean, probably the most basic one that anyone could think about is like past drug use. Or if you are in debt, who do you owe money? Do you have any foreign contacts? Have you been visiting a lot of foreign countries lately? So basically, they're looking for anything

that could potentially open you up to influence from another foreign country or another actor like that and seeing if you have any vulnerabilities. And if you get rejected through that process, is that it? No security clearance? Sometimes. But we have been seeing in the Trump White House that is not the case. What's going on with the Trump White House, that is not the case. What's going on with the Trump White House? So in the Trump administration, there are a lot of people who in the past have been working off of just interim security clearances. So they haven't been given the green light by the FBI and career officials to have their permanent security clearance instated. Or in some case, there are people whose applications for a permanent top secret security clearance have

been rejected by career officials, yet these people still seem to be getting their clearances anyways. So where does this start exactly in the Trump administration? Yeah. So the first time that this came up was actually pretty early in Trump's presidency. So if we remember Trump's former national security advisor, Michael Flynn, who was not on the job for very long. He had to leave the White House in February 2017, just a few months after Trump had taken office, when it was revealed that he had lied to Vice President Mike Pence about his discussions with the Russian ambassador. This was this huge scandal, one of the first of Trump's presidencies. So Flynn is forced out, but Trump does not pull his top secret security clearance,

which we should say right off the bat, this isn't illegal. Trump kind of, as the president, has the authority to do what he wants in this scene. But it's certainly very unusual, and it raises a lot of eyebrows and gives a lot of cause for concern. And so Michael Flynn has access to everything he had access to in the White House, even once he's out of the White House. Yes. Are there other high profile examples of this happening? So the next time this comes up and it's this huge scandal, it's Rob Porter. So Rob Porter, he was a former staff secretary in the Trump White House, and he was working on an interim security clearance. So it's not like there was nothing. He had sort of had this initial vetting, but again, was still waiting for his permanent security clearance to come in. this separate scandal where two of his former ex-wives came forward and accused him of being domestic abuser, basically. But in light of all of this, people realize that he, as the president's

staff secretary, is handling some of the most sensitive files to cross the president's desk with an interim security clearance. So he is looking at state secrets, very sensitive state secrets, without a permanent security clearance. And that's a huge deal. Which I guess brings us to the highest profile example of this and the most recently controversial, Jared Kushner. What's the deal with Jared? Jared Kushner first was, again, working off an interim security clearance while he applied for a permanent one. Interestingly, that was downgraded to a secret security clearance in February 2018. And then even after his application for a top security clearance was rejected by career White House officials, he somehow still gets it. And

the New York Times recently reported that that happened after Trump himself personally intervened against the wishes of his former chief of staff, John Kelly, and former White House counsel, Don McGahn. Do we have any idea why Jared Kushner's security clearance wasn't approved? We don't know for sure. And that's what some of these investigations are trying to find out. But we do know that Jared Kushner has business entanglements and foreign contacts, including ones with Russia, United Arab Emirates, Israel. Certainly, he has not disclosed things about his meetings with Russian ambassador Sergei Kislyak, other Russian nationals that have come under the interest of some investigations, including the special counsel, Robert Mueller, that could certainly be something that came up. Okay, so we've got Michael Flynn, Rob Porter, and Jared Kushner, these three high-profile examples of sort of unusual practices when it comes to security clearances.

Are there others, or is that it? There is one other notable one that we should mention, and that's Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner's wife and the president's daughter. What happened there? It's kind of the same thing as Kushner. I mean, I don't think there is the same level of detail as to whether her application was denied and overruled. But we know that Trump, like he did with Kushner, kind of personally intervened to give his daughter a security clearance.

And we should note, I mean, there are these high-profile examples, but it seems like this problem is much larger than just those at the Trump White House. NBC News reported that there are over 30 people that this has happened to where these career officials who are holdovers from previous administrations, they're not political appointees, they have recommended that these applications be denied and they get overruled. And I guess in the case of people like Kushner or even Ivanka, it seems almost obvious that the president might intervene personally, but is he intervening across the board in all of these cases?

No, not necessarily. So the person that keeps coming up in all of these cases is a guy named Carl Klein. And Klein is the director of the personnel security division of the executive office of the president in the White House. So this is the office that handles security clearances. The office that is rejecting security clearances in a lot of these cases. Exactly. And Klein has been working at the White House since May of 2017. We don't know that much about him besides the fact that he's a former Pentagon official who came to work in the Trump White House. But the reason that we know even as little as we do about him is one of his subordinates, a woman who NBC News reported was handling Kushner's application. This woman named Tricia Newbold filed a whistleblower complaint

complaining about all of these overrulings that were happening under Klein. So she was one of two specialists who made the decision not to give Kushner a top security clearance, according to NBC's reporting. And we know from her complaint that she said that Klein kind of intervened when she rejected Kushner's application. And he didn't want to talk about it with her. But soon after this, there's this kind of strange thing that happens where she's accusing him of workplace discrimination. So this woman, Tricia Newbold, actually has a rare form of dwarfism, and she accused Klein of putting office files out of her reach. Whoa. Yeah. And telling her she could only retrieve them if she was assisted by other staff. So there's like this kind of crazy element of workplace harassment

going on here as well. And beyond, you know, just kind of dealing this in her day-to-day job, she has these serious concerns that he's kind of flouting past protocol and overruling her and other people. So all this sounds kind of sketchy.

It's unusual. And, I mean, as one former Obama official that I talked to put it to me, this guy named Dan Jacobson, who used to be a lawyer in the White House Counsel's office in the Obama administration, he said, quote, it's completely abnormal and frankly shocking that they would overrule 30 recommendations from career security staff in any administration, let alone the amount of time that the Trump administration has been in office. So again, what Trump's doing isn't technically illegal, but it's concerning to a lot of people that have been in these positions before. The Democrats turned their concern into an investigation after the break on Today Explained. How does a bank account try and save the planet?

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So the Democrats sent the White House a letter in late January saying that they wanted documents and to call witnesses to learn more about these security clearances and the practices in the White House. And so far, they haven't heard much back other than no. So Elijah Cummings is the chairman of the House Oversight Committee. And we should note here that oversight has this very broad mandate. I mean, they're providing oversight on the executive branch. So they have a very broad authority to look into basically whatever they want. And this is the famous committee we saw in the Cohen hearing the other day? Yes, that is the same committee. So the very fact that they sent these letters out as early as they did and are choosing security clearances tells us that they think that there

is something there. What that something is, we don't know yet. And so far, they've gotten no response from the administration. What powers does the oversight committee have to, I don't know, subpoena to dig deeper? So Cummings can certainly issue a subpoena. At this point, as of last week, he was sort of still deciding what he wanted to do. Last week was kind of like the final letter that he sent being like, all right, I am asking, please give me this or I could take further steps. But we also learned last week, there was a report on Axios

that the Democrats actually already have some of the information that the White House is declining to give because there was some leaking going on. So they have a little bit, but they will probably be wanting more. So, yeah, that could take the form of a subpoena. What is the committee hoping to uncover here? Like, do they think they're actually going to find something illegal or just something unethical?

I think at this point we don't really know. Certainly trying to see if there is some sort of abusive executive power going on here illegal or just something unethical? I think at this point, we don't really know. Certainly trying to see if there is some sort of abusive executive power going on here with how Trump is approaching this. But I think that there's also kind of this interesting angle here. I mean, we know that Jared Kushner had contacts with Russian nationals that he didn't disclose on his FBI form. And while certainly the House Oversight Committee isn't about to like duplicate special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Trump and Russia, there's certainly sort of these tangential things that they can do here. And not just Russia, I mean,

other foreign contacts that Kushner has, they're sort of taking a little bit of a deeper look into this. It's almost kind of like another piece of something that they could find out. Obviously, this is just one of a whole slew of investigations that the House is kicking off since Democrats took power. How does looking into security clearances maybe fit into the other ones? Yeah, so there are a number of different investigations that are going on with a pretty heavy focus on Trump in the House. I mean, the House Intelligence Committee and the Foreign Affairs Committee want to know more about Trump's private conversations with Russian President Vladimir Putin. There's a lot of focus on Russia, obviously, Robert Mueller's investigation into Russia. So there is this component because they are scrutinizing Jared Kushner so closely. And the stuff that we know about Kushner is just about kind of his past contacts with Russia that

he didn't really want to tell intelligence officials about before. Basically, if they can find out what was this big red flag that went up on Kushner's background check that made White House officials so hesitant to give him a security clearance? What are these alarm bells that have been going off in the intelligence community about what's in Kushner's background check? And does that fit anywhere else into any of the other investigations that are going on? At this point, we don't know, but it's certainly worth asking the question. Ellen Nilsson covers Congress for Vox. I'm Sean Ramos for him. This is Today Explained. Thanks again to Aspiration for supporting the show today.

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