Ryan calls threat to yank security statuses ‘trolling’

WASHINGTON — House Speaker Paul Ryan on Tuesday played down President Donald Trump’s threat to revoke security clearances of former top officials who have criticized him.

“I think he’s just trolling people, honestly,” Ryan told reporters Tuesday with a laugh.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., was surprised to learn that some of the former top national security and intelligence officials still had access to classified information. But both GOP leaders were leaving the president’s plan to the White House.

“I don’t have any particular advice to give the president,” McConnell said Tuesday. “It’s an interesting question I’ll look forward to seeing what the president decides on it.”

Ryan said it is “something that’s in the purview of the executive branch.”

Democrats and some Republicans, though, viewed the threat against the six former officials with much more concern.

Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., noted the list of those named by the White House “exactly coincides with those who’ve been publicly critical of the president.”

“This is the sort of attack on free speech, the press and the rights of individuals to speak out in our country that really doesn’t serve the president well,” Coons said on CNN.

On Monday, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said the president was “exploring the mechanisms” to strip clearance from former CIA Director John Brennan as well as five other former officials who have held some of the most sensitive positions in government: former FBI Director James Comey; James Clapper, the former director of national intelligence;

former CIA Director Michael Hayden; former national security adviser Susan Rice; and Andrew McCabe, who served as Trump’s deputy FBI director until he was fired in March.

The leaders have served in Democratic and Republican administrations, including Trump’s. But at least two of the former officials, McCabe and Comey, do not currently have security clearances, making the threat moot.

Sanders accused the officials of having “politicized and in some cases monetized their public service and security clearances” by making “baseless accusations” that the Trump administration had improper contact with Russia or was influenced by Russia.

Sanders did not cite specific comments made by any of the officials. But the president has been seething over the backlash to his meeting last week with Russia’s Vladimir Putin and the ongoing investigations into Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election, whether his campaign aides were involved in the effort and whether he obstructed justice.

Another White House spokesman, Hogan Gidley, told reporters aboard Air Force One on Tuesday that the president had “begun the mechanism to remove security clearances from certain individuals,” but he later clarified that he had misspoken.

“What I meant to say was it’s being looked at,” he said.

The idea for blocking access was initially raised Monday by Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, who tweeted that he would be meeting with Trump to discuss revoking Brennan’s clearance for his scathing criticism of the president’s performance at the summit with Putin.

Paul has been no fan of Brennan — he filibustered for 13 hours in a failed attempt to block Brennan’s 2013 nomination for CIA director — and the senator’s non-interventionist views put him at odds with much of the rest of the national security establishment.

But in Trump, Paul has found an audience and an ally as he tries to move the GOP off its hawkish foreign policy traditions.

“I told the president in private what I’ve been saying in public: I think there’s a great danger having talking heads on TV who are ex-CIA agents and still have classified clearance,” Paul said on Fox News.

Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff of California, a ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, tweeted that “politicizing security clearances to retaliate against former national security officials who criticize the President would set a terrible new precedent.”

“An enemies list is ugly, undemocratic and un-American,” he added.

Former CIA directors and other top national security officials are typically allowed to keep their clearances, at least for some period, as a courtesy and so they can be in a position to advise their successors.

While standing next to Putin, Trump last week openly questioned U.S. intelligence agencies’ conclusions that Moscow tried to tip the scales of the 2016 election in his favor and seemed to accept Putin’s insistence that Russia’s hands were clean.

Brennan slammed those comments as “nothing short of treasonous” and accused Trump of being “wholly in the pocket of Putin.”

Information for this article was contributed by Deb Riechmann of The Associated Press.