Democrats want details of top security clearances
WASHINGTON — A powerful Democratic House committee chairman investigating possible abuses of the government’s security clearance process stepped up demands on Friday to see key documents and interview potential witnesses from the White House in light of a report that President Donald Trump personally intervened to grant his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, a top-secret clearance despite legal and national security concerns.
Mr. Kushner received the security clearance despite concerns from intelligence and White House officials about his contacts with foreign individuals and his failure to disclose them on his clearance application. Both of those factors ordinarily would all but guarantee that an applicant not be given access to government secrets.
News reports said that Mr. Trump’s intervention so concerned senior administration officials that John F. Kelly, then the White House chief of staff, documented the action in a contemporaneous internal memo that said he had been “ordered” to grant Mr. Kushner a topsecret clearance.
Rep. Elijah E. Cummings of Maryland, who leads the House Oversight and Reform Committee, accused the White House in a letter Friday of stonewalling his requests for information and implied that if it did not comply voluntarily, he would issue a subpoena.
He said the report, published by The New York Times, added new concerns that Mr. Trump was not honest to the public about his role in the clearance process and broader questions about irregularities surrounding who should have access to sensitive government secrets.
The Times also reported that Donald F. McGahn II, then the White House counsel, wrote a memo of his own documenting concerns raised by the CIA and other officials about Mr. Kushner. Mr. McGahn, the memo noted, had recommended against giving him such broad access to the government’s secrets.
Mr. Trump told The Times in January that he had no role in Mr. Kushner’s clearance.
Mr. Cummings has been pursuing reported irregularities since 2017, when Republicans were in control of the House. He started a broad inquiry last month after taking control of the panel, Congress’s most muscular investigative body.
“If true, these new reports raise grave questions about what derogatory information career officials obtained about Mr. Kushner to recommend denying him access to our nation’s most sensitive secrets,” Mr. Cummings wrote in a letter to Pat Cipollone, the White House counsel. The letter went on to ask about “why President Trump concealed his role in overruling that recommendation, why General Kelly and Mr. McGahn both felt compelled to document these actions, and why your office is continuing to withhold key documents and witnesses from this Committee.”
House investigators are demanding that the White House turn over documents related to security clearances of top officials by Monday.
Mr. Cummings has also asked for documents related to a review of the security clearance process that Mr. Kelly conducted in 2018 that concluded there were serious flaws in the system.