In an unprecedented move experts say could present a major national security risk, Donald Trump is handing out temporary top secret security clearances to White House staff without any of the usual background checks.
Senators on the Senate Intelligence Committee told NOTUS they haven’t seen the list of who or how many people are getting the security clearances, and Republicans are shrugging their shoulders about the potential dangers.
Trump signed a memo Monday allowing his office to send a list of people who could be “immediately granted interim Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information (TS/SCI) security clearances,” pointing to a backlog, which the memo says is hindering the White House’s ability to function. Senate Republicans defended Trump’s sweeping action, alleging he was left with little choice.
“While it’s not the best way to do it, it is probably their only alternative in the first couple months,” Sen. Mike Rounds, an Intelligence Committee member, told NOTUS.
But experts argue that Trump’s action was not the only option, and there is already a legal provision to expedite temporary clearances that allows for less-intensive background checks to provide staff the necessary clearances to get to work while a more intensive review is ongoing.
“It seems unnecessary given that interim clearances can go through the normal procedure and be done in just a few days,” especially with a White House request for expedited processing, the president of the Federal Clearance Assistance Service, William Henderson, told NOTUS.
“If you’re the clearance authority and somebody gives you a name and says, ‘Give this person a clearance,’ you don’t know if his brother is working for the Mossad. You don’t know anything about it,” Henderson added.
Republican Senators either ceded trust to President Trump or deflected questions about security concerns — ranging from Sen. Rick Scott’s, “I believe the president’s going to do the right thing to keep our country safe,” to Sen. Thom Tillis’ “I haven’t looked at it, I think due diligence is pretty important.”
Democrats pointed to a more nefarious reason than pure convenience: Trump could be slipping people into top positions that wouldn’t otherwise pass security muster.
“He must feel like those — I don’t know who those specific are — but I guess he feels that they wouldn’t qualify under the normal process for a security clearance,” Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly, who serves on the Intelligence Committee, told NOTUS.
Congress will also be in the dark as to who exactly will get the clearances. Committee Vice Chair Mark Warner’s office told NOTUS: “There’s no legal requirement to share this list with the Hill.”
The idea is not entirely new. In 2017, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner was initially denied the same top secret clearance Trump is now granting his staffers, but the decision was overruled by a supervisor, according to reporting at the time.
Typically, security clearances involve the FBI investigating a person’s background, family, friends, neighbors and financial ties to ensure there aren’t weak spots that could make a person vulnerable to leaking top secret information or blackmail. Temporary clearances are less intensive, but also involve a background check.
“Being completed as expeditiously as possible, the background investigation focuses on character and conduct,” the FBI told NOTUS in a statement, but did not comment on backlogs.
“The FBI does not publicly comment on investigations,” it added.
Trump’s memo does not mention any background checks, and the White House didn’t respond to a request for comment for this story. In the memo, Trump blamed Biden for the security clearance backlog, though people who have gotten top secret clearances say delays are not a new phenomenon.
One former Trump staffer, who started after January 2017, said that from their first day at work (when they filled out their clearance forms), it took almost two months for the FBI to contact them.
Because of the lapse in a security clearance, the former official said, it caused them to miss a Situation Room meeting on National Security, prompting then-Vice President Mike Pence to later say, “You got to be in there. We got to run this government.”
They added, “It does take them enormous amounts of time, and I think that’s what the president was looking at, because we had several people that needed that, that it just took way too long to get them clearances. They couldn’t do their jobs right away.”
Presidential transition experts point to Trump’s own actions exacerbating an already long process of clearing people to work with top secret information: his failure to sign agreements with the White House and relevant agencies by typical deadlines.
A provision in presidential transition law also links certain government services during the transition period with disclosure and transparency requirements, and sets a $5,000 outside contribution limit that Trump refused to accept.
“Frankly, one of the challenges the incoming administration has right now is they were slow to engage with the FBI for background checks, and that slowed down their process of being able to have people with the background checks necessary for a security clearance review,” said Max Stier, president and CEO of the Partnership for Public Service. “It is a shortcut which could have potentially very negative consequences.”
Experts and some lawmakers argued that clearance delays — even if they were exacerbated this year — are no excuse for putting the country’s secrets at risk.
“We do this in an orderly way for a reason. We don’t want certain individuals who we feel are risks of releasing classified information to our adversaries,” Kelly said. “This is day one. Let the FBI do their job.”
But for Trump loyalists like Scott, trust in Trump overrides concern.
“He’s the president of the United States, this is what he got elected to do.”
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Claire Heddles is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow. Jasmine Wright is a reporter at NOTUS.