Today, Explained - Insecurity complex

Episode Date: August 23, 2018

The president has threatened to revoke the national security clearances for current and former government officials. The Washington Post's Shane Harris explains why this is a bad idea for basically everyone. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Support for the program today comes from Google Play, where you can find lots and lots of audiobooks. And for a limited time, you can get $10 off an audiobook when you log in with your Google account at g.co slash play slash explained. There are over a thousand titles to choose from. We use the word unprecedented a lot talking about President Donald Trump, but there are so many unprecedented things, it's rare that one sticks around that long before we move on to the next. Late Tuesday afternoon, the president's campaign manager and personal lawyer went down as guilty in the same hour. Unprecedented. But come Wednesday, there were still lots of people talking about an unprecedented thing the president did last week.

His press secretary, Sarah Sanders, was even asked about it at an otherwise mostly Manafort-Cohen press briefing. Last time that we were in here, you read off some ex-officials and one current official who the president was considering taking away their security clearance. I wanted to follow up on that and ask you, who is conducting that review? I'm sorry? Who's doing the review? A number of people involved here at the White House.

Last Wednesday, President Trump revoked the security clearance of the former CIA director, John Brennan. Again, unprecedented. He gave a number of reasons, and it's important to say that none of them had to do with John Brennan violating the terms of his security clearance. Shane Harris covers intelligence and national security for the Washington Post. So there was no allegation that he illegally disclosed classified information or improperly handled information or did something wrong in that respect, which is kind of what your clearance governs. Got it. Basically, he said in a statement that Sarah Sanders read last week, Mr. Brennan has recently leveraged his status as a former high-ranking official with access to highly sensitive information to make a series of unfounded and outrageous

allegations, wild outbursts on the internet and television about this administration. And it is true that John Brennan, I think more than any other former intelligence official, has gone farther in his critiques of the president. He is, I think, the most divisive president we've ever had in the Oval Office. He is feeding and fueling hatred and animosity and misunderstandings among Americans. But what was remarkable about this reasoning is that the president didn't even really hide it. This was in response to John Brennan's political statements to his critique of the president. So that I think struck a lot of people, myself included, as quite remarkable. And that is not a reason that people have their security clearances revoked. That's

never happened. How did John Brennan respond? Well, you know, Brennan sort of took it on the chin a little bit. And he came out quickly with a tweet. He's been in this Twitter war with the president. Yeah. And said, if the president thinks that this is going to make me relent or be silent, he's wrong. And I think that Brennan kind of kept on doing what he's doing. I think right now this country is in a crisis in terms of what Mr. Trump has done and is liable to do. He's drunk on power. He really is.

And I think he's abusing the powers of that office. You know, he tried to not make this about himself personally, but he maintained that he has a right under the First Amendment to talk about the president however he wants, that he hadn't violated the terms of his clearance. And he said, essentially, look, take away the clearance. I'm not even using it. I don't have a job or a board position that requires me to have it. But he made very clear that he believes that this was actually a violation of First Amendment principles of free speech. And this happened last week. Right. Last Wednesday.

So what's happened since? So I think a couple things are happening. First, the president had already indicated that he was going to pull Brennan's clearance. And there are about eight or nine other current and former officials, mostly formers, that he's threatened to do the same. James Clapper, James Comey, Michael Hayden, Sally Yates, Susan Rice, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page. There's also a guy on there who most people have never heard of, who has the distinction of being the only current serving official in government. And Bruce Ohr. Who was a senior department of justice official who's been demoted. What's different about Bruce Ohr is that he's in government. If you take his clearance away, he can't do his job. Right. It's effectively like firing him. I think Bruce Ohr is a disgrace. I suspect I'll be taking it away very quickly.

And what we understand from our reporting at the Washington Post is that the decision to revoke those clearances has actually already been made. And the White House is going to start rolling them out when it's advantageous in the news cycle. Really? If you look at the paperwork that the White House released, it's like dated from back in July. They forgot to change the date. Whoa. And they released it to distract from the news about Omarosa's book release. Whoa.

So there's a cynical ploy in here, whatever, which is remarkable too, and the White House is not even hiding this at all. But what happened after Brennan got his clearance revoked is that a group of 12, and then later it was added three more to make it 15, former directors or deputy directors of intelligence agencies, so the top people, Brennan's peer group, that elite group,

came out with a public letter saying we condemn this action by the president. To us, this had nothing to do with national security. This had everything to do with politics. And what bothered us about it is the use of a national security tool, the granting and revocation of security clearances for political purposes, in this case, to intimidate others from speaking out and criticizing the president and his policies. Not all of us agree with what John said. Not everybody agrees with the way he said it. But they said, look, we defend his right to say what he said. And you cannot use the security clearance process as a political tool to punish your enemies.

So that comes out. And then a former Admiral Bill McRaven, who is most famous for leading the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, he came out with an op-ed in the Washington Post condemning this. McRaven wrote, I would consider it an honor if you would revoke my security clearance as well, so I can add my name to the list of men and women who have spoken up against your presidency. And also even going farther and saying that the president was embarrassing us in front of our allies, in front of our children, he even said. Wow. This spawns another letter of former CIA officials who said, I want to be on this list too. So 60 of them release a letter. Some days later, even more people start contacting the organizers of this campaign and saying, I want to put my name on it. These are people who've worked in Democratic administrations, Republican administrations.

Many of these are career people, so they were not political appointees. So their political affiliation is kind of irrelevant. 177 people signed a letter this week to come out. Look, I look at that list. I know many of the people on that list. These are not people who come out and make political statements. It is against the ethos of people in the military and the intelligence community to enter the political fray. And so you have to remember that when they're putting their name on that list and

associating themselves with this protest of what the president did, that is new territory for them to be in. And that is not a space that they are comfortable occupying and working in. And they did it anyway. And that gives you a sense of how deeply felt I think this concern really is. And it's obviously it's pointing up to a lot of other issues that people in the intelligence community have with the president, not just his handling of the security clearance issue. So there's a sense then, I guess, maybe a growing sense that if you make the president angry, you speak out against him, he'll find a way to seek retribution, maybe revoke your clearance, and maybe revoke your livelihood. That is precisely what the people who are signing these letters believe and that they're

worried about. And they think that that is the message that the president has sent. And I have to say that based on the president's statements and his tweets, I haven't seen him making any statements that would disabuse him of that notion. Trump tweeted, even James Clapper has admonished John Brennan for having gone totally off the rails. Maybe Clapper is being nice to me so he doesn't lose his security clearances for lying to Congress. So in essence, President Trump is saying that security clearances for former Intel chiefs is based on whether they're nice to him. Nice to him. Let's let that sink in

for just a second. And now he's threatening to pull the security clearance of a former FBI official named Phil Mudd, who is a CNN commentator, because he caught a clip of Phil Mudd criticizing the president in a way that the president thought was unhinged. This is not about security clearances. This is about the president trying to intimidate people to say, you're a dog and I'll muzzle you. We spent our career saying that we're fighting for the right of 330 million Americans to speak. And the president said, no, that will never happen in this country. All of us will speak until we are dragged

away. I don't care what I say. I don't care what John Brennan says. I have the right to say it. So he's saying maybe I should pull his clearance. I mean, that is basically the president saying, I saw you on TV. I don't like what you said about me. I'm going to pull your clearance. It is, I mean, it is a nakedly political move. I mean, he's not even hiding the fact that this is punitive. Is there a chance that something like the Mueller investigation could be impeded by the president deciding like, oh, that, you know, maybe not Robert Mueller himself, but, you know, that senior ranking DOJ official that I don't really like.

I'm going to pull his clearance. Yeah, absolutely. And there are people on the Hill, Democrats so far, who have been voicing that concern as well. I mean, there's clearly nothing to stop him from pulling his security clearances. And if he did that, I don't know if it would grind the investigation entirely to a halt. It probably would, but it would massively impede it. They need that clearance when they show up to work each day. Next up on Today Explained, what exactly is security clearance and why is it so important to all of these people even after they leave their jobs in the government. out some of the cheaper selections because right now you get $10 off when you go to g.co slash play slash explained and log in with your Google account. There's a bunch of titles to choose from. One of them is Moby Dick, a novel by Herman Melville in which an eerily compelling

madman is pursuing an unholy war against a creature as vast and dangerous and unknowable Thank you. We talked about the first episode, which examines how we disagree with friends and family on a previous episode of this show. The latest episode of The Arthur Brooks Show examines the experiences of conservative professors on college campuses and features friend of Today Explained, Vox's Zach Beecham. You can find The Arthur Brooks Show wherever you find your podcasts. And while you're looking for The Arthur Brooks Show in your podcast app, whatever it might be, don't forget to rate and review Today Explained. Appreciate it. It feels like we've heard more about security clearance in one and a half years of the Trump administration than we've ever heard about it before in the previous six or seven administrations, at least. What the heck is security clearance and how do you get it? So maybe the best way to answer that question in

the present moment is to start by just saying what a security clearance is not. Okay. Because there's a big misimpression about what a security clearance is. Security clearance is not like a library card that gives the bearer or the holder of that clearance unfettered access to anything in the collection of classified information. Having a security clearance is a little bit more like having a pilot's license. So let's say you're a pilot and you want to fly for Delta Airlines. Well, just because you have that license doesn't mean you get to show up at Delta and start flying any kind of aircraft you want, any route you want, any size plane. The clearance just says that you have gone through the necessary background checks to prove that you are capable of maintaining secret information, not spilling any secrets, that you don't have debt that a foreign government could use to blackmail you, that you don't have aspirations to overthrow the government. These are the actual questions that people get asked in a Packard interview.

And it just says, okay, you are trustworthy enough to have security clearance. Then what you get to see in terms of classified information is determined on what's called need to know. So do you as a holder of a security clearance at CIA need to know a particular piece of information, say, about drone strikes in Pakistan, right, or counterterrorism operations in northern Africa? And if you do, you get what's called read-in on that set of classified information, and you get to see that. You do not get to see the universe of anything that you want. When you talk about things like debts to foreign governments, it feels sort of ironic that, you know, President Trump doesn't have to pass a background check to read all this classified information. We've heard a lot about people like Jared Kushner's security clearance coming and going. Who in the administration gets sort of unfettered access and who doesn't? And how does that work? So if you were a director of an agency,

you pretty much get to see whatever you want because you have a need to know it all, right? You're running the agency. Very senior White House officials like Jared Kushner would have the kinds of clearances typically that do give them access to a lot of information. But when you're talking about people who really know effectively all of the secrets or a lot of the stuff, you're talking about people at the very kind of tippy top of the pyramid. You're not talking about mid-level employees. You're not talking about necessarily even some senior employees in particular divisions. They may have only limited access as well. So it sounds like the thing that's like hard to get and closely guarded once you get it. So how are all these former government administrators or cabinet leaders who are

now like CNN commentators, for example, holding on to their security clearances and why? Right. So in the case of Brennan, so let's take him for instance, all former CIA directors keep their security clearance. The reason for that is so that the person who comes after them can call them up and consult them on a particular crisis, or maybe they say, hey, we need to come back and talk to you about how you handled that operation in Afghanistan that one time, or we're dealing with this particular challenge. Do you have any thoughts based on your experience of how we should be approaching this and what we should know? It's basically there for the convenience of the government so that they can call him up whenever

they need him. Now, there are some people who maintain the clearance because they might then go take a job in the private sector that requires a clearance. So if you go work for Lockheed Martin, working for the CIA on a contract, the CIA might sponsor your clearance, and then you're back in the game and you get access to whatever information you need. So what's the process for revoking the security clearance of a John Brennan? Does the president just make a phone call? It's actually, it's funny you mentioned that. I'm still trying to understand what the literal process was. In this case, did he send a piece of paper over to the CIA that says revoke his clearance? Now, one reason why it's so unclear how this works is because the president's never done this before. Right.

The president has the authority to grant and deny clearances to whomever he wants, but it's never really been used this way. So in a sense, it is kind of like the clearance is gone because the president says so. So what does it mean to have your security clearance revoked for someone like John Brennan? I mean, someone who was an important figure in the Central Intelligence Agency. Can he no longer weigh in on these questions that might come up for the current director of the CIA? That's right. So if Gina Haspel, the current director, wanted to call him and read him in on an operation that they're planning to

try and get his insights on something that might be relevant, she can't do that. So the CIA has kind of lost that institutional knowledge access to Brennan. Now, from a financial point of view, it means nothing to him. He does not have a commentator deal with NBC News because he had a security clearance. I mean, it's not going to hit him in the pocketbook. It is more the institutional loss to his former agency, and then it is the broader symbolic aspect of this. And I think the president, you know, certainly knows that. And we understand from our recent reporting that there are people,

senior aides in the White House who are cautioning him to basically stop at Brennan. You've made your point. Don't keep going farther, because if you go after someone like Bruce Ohr, now you are getting into the position where you're actually impinging upon the ability for someone to do their job for the United States. And is this why so many people are speaking out against the president right now? Why is it such a big deal? Is it just what the continuation of this sort of tit for tat, speak ill of me and I'll revoke your clearance could mean for the future of the office? Yeah, I think that you're seeing now people attaching themselves to the security clearance issue in a genuine way. They do deeply care about that. But I know for a

fact that many of the people on that list have many other concerns about the way the president behaves and the way that he is attacking the intelligence community. He has portrayed them as a deep state out to get him that are trying to undo his democratic election. And I think that he believes that going after them on this particular issue is winning for him, particularly with his base. And I think that they've chosen this moment to push back against him because they do have a point that they can defend on this clearance issue. It is highly unorthodox what he's doing. There are First Amendment implications. But I really do think there are some deeper unsaid aspects of this protest as well. Could this just be President

Trump finding a way to sort of expand the powers of the presidency and break with various traditions that were nothing more than traditions, the way he just still hasn't released his tax returns or pardoning Dinesh D'Souza and whomever else he wants. is a largely uncontested – well, it is an uncontested authority that the president has. No president has ever used it in the arguably capricious manner that Trump has. And the clearance revocation, also the same. I mean no previous president would have dreamed of doing the things that Donald Trump has done. But in so many instances, we see that it turns out that those are legal. He has those authorities to do them. It's been tradition and kind of ethics that have restrained previous presidents from that. So I think he's discovered or been told that he has this ability to deny clearances to people whenever he wants.

And he's going to use it as a political tool the same way he has the pardon power. And what's at stake? I mean this is a security issue. Security clearances. Will revoking clearances make us less secure? Yeah. I mean, look, if you really want to get to the why does this matter, put aside, you know, oh, former government officials aren't going to have their clearances. They can't sit on boards and make six-finger incomes. Boo-hoo.

I think if he creates a climate in which he, the president, convinces currently serving government employees, particularly intelligence analysts, the kinds of people who have to deliver bad news to him, who have to speak truth to power, who have to go write reports about what people in foreign capitals are saying about him or how his policy is being perceived by our adversaries. his retribution, which could include him stripping their clearance and taking away their livelihood, their inability to feed their family, there is a real chance that those people could start pulling punches, that they could not tell of the information that he needs to do his job by scaring the hell out of everyone whose job is to tell him what he needs to know, that is going to very negatively affect the national security of this country. Shane Harris reports on intelligence and national security for The Washington Post. I'm Sean Ramos for MTHIS Today Explained. There are lots of different things on Google Play, but Google would like me to tell you that there are audiobooks on Google Play. And right now you can get $10 off your next audiobook at Google Play when you go to g.co.play.explained, log in with your Google account, get $10 off your next audiobook.