On a Normal Day, This Would Be the Story

Posted by BooMan | Jan 25, 2019 | 25 |

If today had been any ordinary day, we’d be talking about this major NBC News scoop:

Jared Kushner’s application for a top-secret clearance was rejected by two career White House security specialists after an FBI background check raised concerns about potential foreign influence on him — but their supervisor overruled the recommendation and approved the clearance, two sources familiar with the matter told NBC News.

The official, Carl Kline, is a former Pentagon employee who was installed as director of the personnel security office in the Executive Office of the President in May 2017. Kushner’s was one of at least 30 cases in which Kline overruled career security experts and approved a top-secret clearance for incoming Trump officials despite unfavorable information, the two sources said. They said the number of rejections that were overruled was unprecedented — it had happened only once in the three years preceding Kline’s arrival.

Even if I intuitively knew this must be going on, it’s still shocking to see it in print. There are at least 30 people working in this administration who have security clearances that pose an unacceptable degree of risk to our national security. I think that’s probably a bigger deal than the news about Jared Kushner, if only because it indicates a kind of rot that is impossible to contain.

The sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the information, said the Trump White House attracted many people with untraditional backgrounds who had complicated financial and personal histories, some of which raised red flags.

At some point my ability to snark fails me, but half the man’s cabinet has already resigned in disgust or disgrace, and then there’s his revolving chiefs of staff, national security advisers, and communications staff. I wonder how many of his people actually passed their background checks.

As for Kushner, things are beginning to look pretty grim for him.

A German bank reportedly has evidence of “suspicious transactions” related to Jared Kushner’s family accounts and is willing to hand the information over to Russia probe special counsel Robert Mueller.

The board chairman of the banking giant Deutsche Bank, Paul Achleitner, called for an internal investigation and found troubling results, German business magazine Manager Magazin reported in its print edition released on Friday.

Deutsche Bank—a major lender to President Donald Trump and his son-in-law and senior White House advisor Kushner, according to Mother Jones—provided the results to the Federal Financial Supervisory Authority, which is Germany’s bank regulatory agency and referred to as BaFin.

“Achleitner’s internal detectives were embarrassed to deliver their interim report regarding real estate tycoon Kushner to the financial regulator BaFin,” states the Manager Magazin story translated from German to English. “Their finding: There are indications that Donald Trump’s son-in-law or persons or companies close to him could have channeled suspicious monies through Deutsche Bank as part of their business dealings.”

This won’t come as any surprise to the professionals who checked out Kushner’s background. He failed the initial test and then he really flunked when the CIA took a look to see if he should get a sensitive compartmented information (SCI) clearance that would give him access to transcripts of intercepted foreign communications and direct CIA source reporting.

After Kline overruled the White House security specialists and recommended Kushner for a top-secret clearance, Kushner’s file then went to the CIA for a ruling on SCI.

After reviewing the file, CIA officers who make clearance decisions balked, two of the people familiar with the matter said. One called over to the White House security division, wondering how Kushner got even a top-secret clearance, the sources said. Top-secret information is defined as material that would cause “exceptionally grave damage” to national security if disclosed to adversaries.

The sources say the CIA has not granted Kushner clearance to review SCI material.

And here’s the real coup de grâce:

The Washington Post, citing current and former U.S. officials familiar with intelligence reports on the matter, reported last February that officials in at least four countries had privately discussed ways they could manipulate Kushner by taking advantage of his complex business arrangements, financial difficulties and lack of foreign policy experience.

Among those nations discussing ways to influence Kushner to their advantage, according to the current and former officials, were the United Arab Emirates, China, Israel and Mexico, the Post reported.

On the basis of potential foreign influence, the adjudicator deemed Kushner’s application “unfavorable” and handed it to a supervisor.

Yet, because he’s the president’s son-in-law, he gets to see whatever he wants. Under the circumstances, it’s easy to see why the betting markets are getting bullish on a Kushner indictment.

About The Author

BooMan

Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.

25 Comments

mainsailset on January 25, 2019 at 5:20 pm

Among the many reports about Kushner was an earlier one that described him as a voracious reader of the PDB.

And then there was the reporting that he had shared with the Saudi Prince the list of suspected crown enemies.

Perhaps one of the hardest jobs Mueller and the IC has had is to keep their heads in the game, knowing what they know and not leaking what is truly a grave national security risk. Maybe that’s why the professional insider pundits have all been in awe of just how fast Mueller’s team has worked to bring light to what’s happened, they are driven. But no matter how fast the team has worked, the team of enablers has worked nearly as hard to obstruct.
- The Voice In The Wilderness on January 25, 2019 at 7:58 pm
  
  Googled PDB. Got Protein data Bank and Python Debugger.
  ????
  - netjunki on January 25, 2019 at 8:04 pm
    
    Presidential Daily Brief 🙂
    
    Trying not to remember the time I first learned about these…
  - byzantium on January 25, 2019 at 8:45 pm
    
    Ha ha, Marie was Queen of the three and four letter acronyms. She once wrote: SMBV’s, and I was thinking, “A new hybrid SUV introduces by General Motors?” (GM) Turns out it was Single Male Black Voters. Oh, OK, got you, Marie.
    - oaguabonita on January 26, 2019 at 4:41 pm
Cugel on January 25, 2019 at 5:21 pm

When I heard this, I thought to myself “Well, this is bad. U.S. intelligence agencies tell Trump “you can’t give your idiot kids top level security clearances because they’re compromat and Trump overrules them.”

Then I realized “But nothing those idiots could possibly do to national security is remotely as bad as what Trump himself is doing on a daily basis. It’s like telling a patient with Ebola that he’s running a risk of getting a bad case of influenza.”

We have a crisis in the Middle East, a crisis in Latin America, a crisis in Eastern Europe with Russia, and various manufactured crises with China, not to mention the ongoing national humiliation that is Trump’s refusal to do anything about Global Warming.

None of these crises are getting better, and Trump is absolutely incapable of dealing with any of them. We are left hoping that nothing blows up that requires him to make difficult decisions because of course he’s incapable of even understanding what is going on, let alone be able to come up with a strategy to cope with them.

So far we’ve been far luckier than we deserve to be. If there was some kind of Cuban Missile Crisis today we’d all be dead already.
Phil Perspective on January 25, 2019 at 6:03 pm

This should also be huge news:

Mike Pompeo just named Eliot Abrams his new special envoy for Venezuela. Abrams plead guilty to withholding information from Congress about the Iran-Contra affair. Pompeo says Abrams will be in charge of “all things related to our efforts to restore Democracy in Venezuela.” pic.twitter.com/mCyJKikJyn

— John Hudson (@John_Hudson) January 25, 2019

Read the whole thread. I hope Dick Durbin is happy now.
- RUKidding on January 25, 2019 at 6:30 pm
  
  Oh Good Lord.
  
  What next?
  
  Henry the K to the White Courtesy Telephone.
  - Phil Perspective on January 25, 2019 at 10:16 pm
    
    It’s why Durbin, or any Democrat, was/is stupid to jump aboard the coup train.
- soapdish on January 25, 2019 at 7:06 pm
  
  Failing upward.
  Hell, a conviction is a plus with Wingnut Welfare.
  - Procopius on January 26, 2019 at 2:31 am
    
    I think Abrams was one of Hillary’s advisers when she was pushing for bombing Libya. How’d that work out for ya? The good news was they arrested Roger Stone yesterday.
    - Libraryguy on January 26, 2019 at 7:19 am
      
      Really?
      
      I just did a quick search and only find Abrams attacking Hillary for Benghazi. No advising her on Libya.
      - seabe on January 26, 2019 at 7:44 am
        
        This person is a consistent troll. Ignore him.
      - oaguabonita on January 26, 2019 at 5:19 pm
        
        . . . search.
        
        It sorta/kinda supports — barely — the characterization of Abrams as “adviser” to Clinton on bombing Libya.
        
        In the lengthy, in-depth Rolling Stone piece that turned up, there are exactly two references to Abrams. Here they are, with a some of the relevant preceding and following content for context (and because I found it interesting and informative!):
        
        During the first two weeks of March, Obama drove the discussion, asking probing questions and voraciously consuming information on Libya, pressing both sides of the debate. “He’s very effective at questioning one person, challenging their premise, and then in the next question to someone else, arguing exactly the opposite,” says a senior administration official. “So you don’t know where he’s coming out, but you do know you have to be intellectually rigorous and honest.” As he analyzed the crisis, Obama kept his own cards close – so much so that even those deeply engaged in the strategy sessions found it hard to get an accurate impression of where he came down on the issue. But in a move that seemed squarely aimed at avoiding the mistakes of Afghanistan and Iraq, Obama also laid down what insiders say was a set of five guiding principles for any intervention in Libya: that it be effective, multilateral, follow international law, put no American boots on the ground, and pursue a well-defined, achievable goal.
        
        To gather outside opinions about Libya and the Arab Spring, the White House also consulted with a wide range of experts. Beginning in February, senior administration officials sat down in the Roosevelt Room with a handful of highprofile analysts, including the neoconservative Elliott Abrams, one of the most vocal opponents of the administration. Abrams, who served as a White House adviser during some of the most questionable international escapades authorized by George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan, was one of 40 militants, including Iraq architect Paul Wolfowitz, who had signed a letter to Obama in February urging the president to protect Libyan civilians and overthrow Qaddafi.
        
        At one briefing, Tom Malinowski of Human Rights Watch, who served as a special assistant to Bill Clinton, also spoke in favor of intervention. Unless America took action, he warned, there would likely be a significant loss of life in Libya, an outcome he called “brutal, bloody and extremely deadly.” Others who attended the session felt that Malinowski’s assessment of the Libyan rebels was “rosy” and “reckless.” Steve Clemons, an influential progressive at the New America Foundation, offered a more skeptical take on the rebel leaders, who included a mix of former Qaddafi thugs, high-minded reformers and militant Islamists once aligned with Al Qaeda. “You better hope these guys aren’t the humanitarians you’re painting them as,” he said, rejecting Malinowski’s upbeat portrayal of the Libyan opposition. “If so, they don’t stand a chance of surviving if Qaddafi falls.”
        
        By March 10th, as Qaddafi’s forces began to fight back, the situation for the rebels was deteriorating rapidly. Going into the weekend, sources say, the White House was leaning toward arming the rebels – a low-cost way to support the Libyan opposition without policing a no-fly zone or launching airstrikes. Donilon backed the move, which would avoid bringing the U.S. into a head-to-head military confrontation with Qaddafi. But the plan alarmed Slaughter, the former State Department policy chief, who emerged as one of the most prominent supporters of intervention. “I was convinced that the White House was leaning toward arming the rebels,” says Slaughter, now at Princeton. “I felt it was the worst of both options. It wasn’t going to work, and it would make things worse.” By the time the rebels got the arms – which could take weeks – she believed that Qaddafi would have already seized Benghazi. On Monday, March 14th, while her former boss was preparing to meet with Mahmoud Jibril in Paris, Slaughter published an op-ed in The New York Times accusing the United States and its allies of “Fiddling While Libya Burns,” as the headline dramatically put it.
        
        The next afternoon, at 4 p.m., Obama met with his top advisers in the White House Situation Room. The president took his seat at the head of the table, flanked by a dozen members of the National Security Council, with almost as many staffers sitting along the wall. Hillary Clinton, who had just arrived in Cairo after leaving Paris that morning, called in on a secure line. She informed the council that she had met with Jibril the night before, and that she believed the Arab League would fully support a no-fly zone over Libya, permitting NATO to effectively ground Qaddafi’s air force by policing the skies with fighter jets flown from Europe and an aircraft carrier positioned off Libya’s coast.
        
        Obama looked through the stack of briefing papers and PowerPoint slides he’d been given. He then received a dire assessment on the military situation from Robert Cardillo, his deputy director for national intelligence. At least three cities formerly held by the rebels, Cardillo reported, had fallen or were about to fall to Qaddafi’s forces, including the strategically important city of Ajdabiya. Obama responded by asking his intelligence advisers what reports of atrocities they had received, and what would happen if Qaddafi retook Benghazi. One adviser said it would be a “mass atrocity,” though he stopped short of calling it genocide. Libyan ambassador Gene Cretz, calling in from Paris, informed the president that the United Nations had a report of a hospital in Libya “where the walls were smeared with blood and the bodies had been removed.” In addition, Cretz pointed out Qaddafi had “slaughtered 1,200 prisoners he’d taken hostage” during the 1990s. Samantha Power, sitting against the wall, also discussed the potential for an atrocity. Rice, attending the meeting via video teleconference from New York, her face projected on a screen at the end of the room directly opposite the president, chimed in, bringing up “experiences we had in the Nineties,” according to a participant in the meeting.
        
        It is still debatable whether Libyan civilians ever faced a genocidal threat. But unlike the false accusations of WMDs leveled against Saddam Hussein, which were intentionally manufactured by the Bush administration to justify its invasion of Iraq, the concerns about atrocities by Qaddafi seemed all too real at the time. According to multiple sources who attended the meeting in the Situation Room, Obama quickly concluded that a no-fly zone wouldn’t be enough to stop the feared massacre: NATO would need to bomb Qaddafi’s tanks and missile sites as well.
        
        “You’re telling me that Benghazi could be overrun this week, but you’re not giving me any options that stop it,” the president said after two hours of discussion. “I want real options.” Obama ordered his team to develop plans that would go “beyond a no-fly zone.” Then he ended the meeting, instructing those present to reconvene at 9 p.m. Donilon and McDonough peeled off to set up a smaller meeting with the national security staff, while Rice put out feelers at the U.N.
        
        At nine, Obama returned from a dinner with Pentagon commanders and entered the Situation Room. (Because it was 3:30 a.m. in Cairo, Clinton was not present.) It was a contentious evening, according to sources familiar with the meeting. When Rice reported that she believed she could get U.N. support for a broader intervention, Gates butted heads with her, seemingly unwilling to relent. Rice argued that the credibility of the U.N. Security Council was at stake. Another senior adviser disagreed, pointing out that though Qaddafi was a horrible person, we had lived with him for decades. Why risk going down a road that could lead to a wider conflict, especially when there were plenty of worse atrocities elsewhere? Obama, as usual, listened without reacting. “He was invariably extremely calm,” said one official who attended the meeting. “He doesn’t get riled up.”
        
        Gates offered a last-ditch case against intervention, arguing that Libya had little strategic value. He warned that the U.S. often ended up “owning” what happened, pointing to Kosovo and the no-fly zone over Kurdistan in Iraq. He said he was wary of getting involved in a third Muslim country, and feared “a stalemate.”
        
        The president answered these arguments himself. According to one participant’s summary, Obama said: Look, the question of who rules Libya is probably not a vital interest to the United States. The atrocities threatened don’t compare to atrocities in other parts of the world, I hear that. But there’s a big “but” here. First of all, acting would be the right thing to do, because we have an opportunity to prevent a massacre, and we’ve been asked to do it by the people of Libya, their Arab neighbors and the United Nations. And second, the president said, failing to intervene would be a “psychological pendulum, in terms of the Arab Spring, in favor of repression.” He concluded: “Just signing on to a no-fly zone so that we have political cover isn’t going to cut it. That’s not how America leads.” Nor, he added, is it the “image of America I believe in.”
        
        The debate was over.
        
        The president ordered Rice to go back to the U.N. and “lean forward” on a resolution that would authorize NATO to strike targets on the ground and take “all necessary measures.” The humanitarian argument for intervention had carried the day. “The media makes as if this was an esoteric discussion on a foreign-policy website about intervention versus realism,” says a White House official. “That’s crap when you’re sitting in the Situation Room and a city of 700,000 is facing indiscriminate slaughter. That’s what moved the president.”
RUKidding on January 25, 2019 at 6:37 pm

Indeed the news about mis-used Security Clearances in the White House has been concerning for quite some time, as we’ve heard dribs and drabs of it before. Now we get a bigger picture.

There’s also been info before about Kushner being easily manipulated. And yet, here we are.

This mis-Administration is so out of control, and yet I see comments on serious blogs (not the usual RedState type) still extolling the alleged “virtues” of so-called “soverign citizen” Trump (that tells you a lot right there), who is just So. Much. Better. than HRC.

Look, I’m not HRC fan, but sheesh. Gimme a break.

Now we have Roger Stone in a barrel brought to alleged “justice” by the FBI. There’s this news about the mis-use of Kushner’s (and others) security clearance in the White House.

And Trump just caved to the Democrats on funding WALL, which Trump never saw as a supposed “National Emergency” until January 3, 2019. Funny thing about the timing…

The other day I happened to read some comments following a newspaper article that basically told the truth about Trump. So many Trumpers (or bots, who knows) came out in force to shriek about the “greatness” of Trump, how he was “draining the swamp,” and so forth.

It’s just damn depressing how these people can continue to maintain such false beliefs. But there you have it.

Some of Trump’s “power” faded today, but I have no doubt that Fox and their fellow traverlers will dream up new propaganda to pump out to their delusional fan base about how Trump somehow was more Masterful than the Ds, and he’s “show them,” you wait ‘n see.

Sigh.
desert rat on January 25, 2019 at 10:04 pm

This should be the story; this is potentially a Pearl Harbor scale attack on our government…
- janicket on January 25, 2019 at 10:12 pm
  
  Holy fuck.
- ZenLoon on January 26, 2019 at 12:25 am
  
  The Trump-McConnell Shutdown placed a giant “Please Trespass” sign on the whole U.S. Government.
- Procopius on January 26, 2019 at 2:34 am
  
  Get a grip.
Procopius on January 26, 2019 at 2:26 am

They said the number of rejections that were overruled was unprecedented — it had happened only once in the three years preceding Kline’s arrival.

This sentence is contradictory. “Unprecedented” means “never happened before.” “Happened only once” means it did happen before. “In the three years” means it happens fairly often. I hate it when I run across sentences like this, which happens more and more often. /pedant
- Libraryguy on January 26, 2019 at 7:22 am
  
  C’mon, it’s right in the comment – “the number of rejections that were overruled was unprecedented”, which means (correctly) that it happening only once in the previous three years is exactly the point.
  
  /pedant
  - NJersey on January 26, 2019 at 7:45 am
    
    Yup.
NJersey on January 26, 2019 at 7:48 am

It’s my understanding that a certain foundational document places authority in a certain House of a certain legislative body to ACTUALLY DO SOMETHING about such transgressions. Maybe it was just a dream I had.
euzoius on January 26, 2019 at 11:53 am

For the incompetent white electorate, everything must be sacrificed on the altar of Latino Harassment.

So who else is a compromised member of the Dirty Thirty? Or should we say the Putin Pack? Bin Salman’s Bunch? How about it, corporate media?

Just another (potentially catastrophic) story for the nation to ignore, I guess. As for the Kushner Kalamity, it’s only the greatest story of prez nepotism in modern times! Ho-hum…
astamari316 on January 26, 2019 at 4:10 pm

And, course, former Justice Kennedy’s son Justin was in charge of a real estate division of Deutsche Bank that doled out $1 billion in loans to Trump when no American bank would. Scandal piled up on scandal piled up on massive corruption.

On a Normal Day, This Would Be the Story

About The Author

BooMan

25 Comments

Recent Posts

Recent Comments