How else could you hire all the swamp creatures?
A White House Personnel Security Office employee is alleging that senior Trump administration officials often rebuffed national security concerns to grant high-level security clearances to people who were initially denied access to top-secret information, a pattern she described as troubling and one she said continued for months.
That employee, Tricia Newbold, laid out a series of explosive allegations, often implicating Carl Kline, the former White House personnel security chief. She kept a list of White House officials whose clearance applications were initially denied but eventually overruled, and said the list included as many as 25 people, some of whom had daily access to the president.
“According to Ms. Newbold, these individuals had a wide range of serious disqualifying issues involving foreign influence, conflicts of interest, concerning personal conduct, financial problems, drug use, and criminal conduct,” aides wrote in the 10-page memo, summarizing Newbold’s testimony. (our emphasis)"[F]oreign influence, conflicts of interest, concerning personal conduct, financial problems, drug use, and criminal conduct..." That sure describes Trump and his "only the best" people to a tee.
We already think we know who two of the 25 (!) problematic perps are:
Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner are among the 25, a source familiar with the list tells me. https://t.co/TOMzUqfDqX— Alexander Marquardt (@MarquardtA) April 1, 2019
The House Oversight and Reform Committee under Chairman Elijah Cummings (D-MD) has been digging into the burgeoning scandal, having recently interviewed Ms. Newbold and requesting (for now) documents from the White House on the clearance office's practices and sketchy overrides of professional staff's concerns. Tuesday, the Committee is planning to subpoena Ms. Newbold's boss, Carl Kline, who ran the security clearance operation at the White House and seemed eager to please Putin pal Donald "Not Exonerated" Trump and his other flunkies at every opportunity.
