Trump critics’ security clearances under review

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump is considering revoking the security clearances of six former U.S. officials who have been criti- cal of his administration.

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Monday that the president is “exploring the mechanisms” to strip clearance from former CIA Director John Brennan as well as five other former top national security officials: former FBI Director James Comey, James Clapper, Michael Hayden, Susan Rice and Andrew McCabe. All six worked during President Barack Obama’s administration.

The comments came hours after Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky tweeted that he was planning to talk to Trump about revoking Brennan’s clearance. After Trump’s summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin last week, Brennan tweeted that Trump was “wholly in the pocket of Putin.”

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

A person familiar with the matter said Comey has not had security clearance for months, and a spokesman for ex-FBI Deputy Director McCabe said he does not currently have security clearance either.

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

“The fact that people with security clearances are making these baseless charges provides inappropriate legitimacy to accusations with zero evidence,” she said.

Paul tweeted later that he had sat down with Trump to talk about Brennan.

“Just got out of WH meeting with real Donald Trump,” he tweeted later in an update. “I restated to him what I have said in public: John Brennan and [other] partisans should have their security clearances revoked.”

He added: “Public officials should not use their security clearances to leverage speaking fees or network talking head fees.”

Democrats immediately criticized the move as an attempt to punish former officials for leveling criticism at Trump.

“This is what totalitarianism looks like,” Sen. Mazie Hirono, D-Hawaii, said in a tweet.

Brennan had called Trump’s press conference with Putin “nothing short of treasonous.” While standing next to Putin, Trump had openly questioned his own intelligence agencies’ conclusions that Moscow was to blame for meddling in the 2016 U.S. election to help Trump and seemed to accept Putin’s insistence that Russia’s hands were clean.

Neither Brennan nor Rice immediately reacted to the news.

Melissa Schwartz, a spokesman for McCabe, tweeted that his security clearance was deactivated when he was terminated in March, “according to what we were told was FBI policy.”

“You would think the White House would check with the FBI before trying to throw shiny objects to the press corps,” she wrote.

Clapper, a career intelligence officer who last served as the director of national intelligence in the Obama administration, described the move by the White House as “unprecedented” and “petty.”

Clapper said there were no grounds for dismissing his clearance, and that the White House’s actions were directed solely at “people who have criticized the president.” He said no one from the White House has contacted him about the matter, which he learned about during Sanders’ remarks.

Former CIA and NSA director Hayden objected to any White House suggestion that he had mishandled classified information or done anything that would be grounds for revoking his security clearance.

Hayden later tweeted that a revocation of his security clearance wouldn’t “have any effect on what I say or write.”

Experts appeared split on whether the president has the authority to terminate a security clearance unilaterally.

“It’s a disputed question. There is a school of thought which holds that the president has complete and exclusive authority over security clearances,” said Steven Aftergood at the Federation of American Scientists’ Project on Government Secrecy. “Others argue that that’s not so and that the president is limited by congressional power and legislative requirements.”

But they agreed that a president asking to revoke the clearance of a political critic would be unprecedented.

Rep. Eliot Engel of New York, the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, called the idea “ridiculous.”

“I mean, what are they afraid of? This is a free country, we have freedom of speech, we have people giving their opinions, and this is just beyond the pale,” he said.