Our view: White House plays fast and loose with security
Special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigators didn’t establish that Donald Trump criminally conspired with Russia in the 2016 presidential election. But it wasn’t for lack of trying by Moscow.
Russian affiliates made “multiple offers” to help Trump, according to Attorney General William Barr’s synopsis of Mueller’s report. A campaign with even a shred of security-minded rectitude would have quickly notified the FBI about Russians dangling dirt on an opponent, rather than eagerly taking a meeting. Not Team Trump.
Now this carelessness has followed the president into the Oval Office where, as it turns out, top-secret clearances are handed out like Halloween candy, and a Chinese woman with a thumb drive of malicious software (along with four cellphones and a laptop) talked her way past the Secret Service recently to enter Trump’s “Winter White House” estate in Florida.
It all adds up to a fast-and-loose attitude toward security from the same people who made endless political hay about Hillary Clinton’s insecure emails:
❚ News reports last year described scores of White House officials lacking long-term security clearances while background checks dragged on endlessly. Last month, Tricia Newbold — an 18-year career White House employee who handles those reviews — came forward as a whistleblower to reveal how 25 officials who failed background checks were subsequently granted access to the nation’s secrets.
The Washington Post, citing people familiar with documents and testimony provided to the House Oversight and Reform Committee, identified one of the 25 as Trump’s son-in-law, senior adviser Jared Kushner, who adjudicators worried might be compromised by foreign influence, outside business activities or personal conduct uncovered in a background check.
❚ Trump’s frequent visits to Mar-aLago, his private Florida resort, challenge a Secret Service that says it must defer to club employees in crosschecking visitors. This might explain why Chinese national Yujing Zhang managed to enter March 30 with all her electronic gear. After a receptionist grew suspicious, Zhang was arrested.
Prosecutors said Monday that a search of her hotel room later turned up a slew of additional suspicious items, including a signal detector that can ferret out hidden cameras, another cellphone and nine USB drives.
Trump dismissed Zhang’s arrest as a fluke (“No, I’m not concerned at all”), but word came Monday that Secret Service Director Randolph Alles is on his way out. Senior Democrats in Congress have rightly asked FBI Director Christopher Wray to assess whether the Mar-a-Lago operation is a national security risk, and one of the new Secret Service director’s priorities should be to improve procedures at all of Trump’s private clubs. Separately, the House panel is investigating how the White House issues security clearances.
Sure, the president can vacation where he wants and, by law, hand out clearances to whomever he pleases. But he also has a duty to protect the nation’s secrets.