Security clearances draw questions from 4 senators
WASHINGTON — Four Democratic senators have charged in a series of letters that the appointment of Michael Flynn as Donald Trump’s national security adviser “might have jeopardized national security” and demanded information on why seemingly obvious red flags were overlooked in his vetting for the position.
The senators also questioned the granting of a top secret security clearance to Sebastian Gorka, a former editor at the Breitbart website who is a senior adviser to Trump. The senators accused Gorka of not noting on his U.S. citizenship application that he had belonged to a neo-Nazi organization in his native Hungary.
“Portions of the White House’s security clearance process have experienced breakdowns since the beginning of the new administration,” the four senators, all members of the Homeland Security Committee, wrote in a series of letters, which were addressed to Defense Secretary James Mattis, FBI Director James Comey and Marcia Lee Kelly, director of management and administration at the White House. The letters were dated March 30 and made available to McClatchy.
Awaiting information
The interest in how the Trump administration vetted its top advisers adds another layer to congressional investigations into a White House now enmeshed in at least three inquiries into whether Trump campaign advisers colluded with Russia to influence the results of last year’s election.
Flynn has offered to testify in those investigations if he is granted immunity from prosecution, but neither the House and Senate intelligence committees nor the FBI have indicated an interest accepting his offer.
The ranking Democrat on the House intelligence committee, Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., said that while Flynn’s suggestion of immunity was “a grave and momentous step” for a former national security adviser, granting it is probably premature in an investigation that “grows in severity and magnitude by the day.”
Schiff noted that the House committee still has not received information from the FBI on whether Flynn had said in his background-check application that he had acted as a paid agent for Turkey last year, a declaration he belatedly made to the Justice Department March 8, more than three weeks after he resigned as Trump’s national security adviser.
The four senators, Thomas Carper of Delaware, Margaret Hassan of New Hampshire, Claire McCaskill of Missouri and Jon Tester of Montana, expressed similar frustration at what they say is a lack of information to their questions about the vetting of top administration officials.
A letter sent in early March to the White House requesting details on Flynn’s security clearance process has not been answered.
The new letter asks for a response by April 14 and asserts that “there is compelling evidence to support that — based on recent reports — his serving as the national security adviser might have jeopardized White House decisions about our national security.”
The senators said Flynn apparently did not report to the Pentagon as required that he received more than $30,000 from Russian state broadcaster Russia Today in 2015 or that he served as a paid agent for Turkey in 2016, when he was serving as a senior Trump campaign adviser.
“When taken together,” the letter said, “they make it exceedingly clear that Mr. Flynn’s re-investigation and adjudication (of his security clearance) should have uncovered his ineligibility to serve as the president’s senior advisor on national security issues.”
‘Nothing has changed’
After his firing Feb. 13, the Defense Intelligence Agency suspended Flynn’s security clearance. It “remains suspended pending review. Nothing has changed,” a DIA spokesman, James Kudla, said Friday.
As for Gorka, the senators wrote that the “deputy assistant to the president may have concealed his membership in the farright Hungarian anti-Semitic organization known as Vitezi Rend on his naturalization application. Such failure to disclose this during the course of one’s naturalization proceedings would be unlawful.”
They also noted a “misdemeanor charge Gorka faced for bringing a 9 mm pistol through a TSA checkpoint at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport.”
“These reports call into question Dr. Gorka’s suitability to hold a Top-Secret security clearance to serve as a senior advisor to the President,” the letters assert.
A spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security referred questions to the White House, which responded with a link to a report in an online publication, Tablet, in which Gorka denied being a member of the Vitezi Rend.