Nobody Has a Right to Security Clearances

A s part of his initial flurry of action at the beginning of his second term — truly a shocking contrast to the moribundity of the Biden administration over the last four years — Donald Trump not only canceled security details for John Bolton, Mike Pompeo, and Pompeo’s aide Brian Hook, but also issued an executive order revoking Bolton’s security clearances, as well as those of all 49 signatories of the infamous “Hunter Biden Letter,” all of them former intelligence officials. (There were 51 original signatories; two have since passed away.) And of course, because Trump is Trump, there is both good and bad in this move.

Removing the three men’s protection is not only an act of petty spite, but actively endangers them, given that they are targets for assassination by Iran. Indeed, they are targets because of their work for Trump during his first administration, which culminated in the droning of Iranian terrorist mastermind Qasem Soleimani in January 2020. I agree completely with the editors of National Review that their protections should be restored, and shudder to think of what will happen to the Trump administration should any harm come to them from a foreign power. (People will neither forget nor forgive Trump’s role in allowing it to happen, should it come to pass.)

But I cheer the Trump administration stripping all of these men and women of their government security clearances, as is his absolute legal right to do, and am in fact upset it was not done sooner. (We all understand why it was not done sooner.) Bolton’s case is an overdetermined one, in fact. Being Trump’s highest-ranking adviser-turned-critic is in fact perfectly sufficient as explanation for his revocation of access — that is the petty part, perhaps — but Bolton did far worse: He allegedly rushed a book into print about his tenure as Trump’s national security adviser without sufficient government pre-review.

This is an inescapable legal requirement for former national security employees writing in public about their work. Nobody would or should survive that kind of recklessness, and again it is appalling he didn’t have his clearances stripped the moment he submitted his book to his publisher. (It is worth noting that Trump could have done this during his first term, as the book was published in June of 2020. Perhaps it was too politically sensitive to do at the time, during a fraught and ultimately failed reelection campaign.)

Meanwhile, what is there left to say about the other 49 chumps who had their clearances taken away on January 20? This action was richly and justly deserved, and even more overdue than Bolton’s revocation. It is profoundly offensive how these people have disgraced the entire U.S. intelligence community and cast enormous doubt upon its ability to be seen as non-political — quite simply because with their actions, these people demonstrated irrevocably that it is not.

I’m sure few readers need reminding that when news of Hunter Biden’s porn-, crime-, and grift-stuffed laptop emerged from the Delaware repair shop where he had abandoned it during the late stages of the 2020 campaign, Politico rushed into print the infamous “Hunter Biden Letter,” an open letter signed by 51 of the United States’ most senior and accomplished intelligence veterans labelling the laptop as having “all the classic earmarks of a Russian intelligence operation.” They then added a hilarious caveat, “We do not know if the e-mails . . . are genuine or not and that we do not have evidence of Russian involvement” — just that they thought so.

This of course — with the weight of seemingly the entire intelligence community and their credibility behind it — became pretext for a massive online censorship campaign. The New York Post was temporarily locked out of all its online accounts for running the story. Mentions of it were suppressed on Twitter and Facebook. Reporter Marc Caputo, then with Politico, revealed angrily the other day that the word from Politico’s editors was: “Don’t write about the laptop, don’t talk about the laptop, don’t tweet about the laptop.”

Absolute truth was treated as falsehood, or in any event “unfit for discussion.” The laptop of course really was Hunter’s, and he really did drunkenly leave it at a laptop repair shop filled with evidence of his misdeeds. (He’s really that stupid.) Who knows if its suppression altered the outcome of the 2020 election? It is pointless to speculate in either way; what is certain is that the Hunter Biden open letter was meant to influence the election, by associating it with “Russian disinformation,” and thus creating the permission structure for mass censorship by raising the ghosts of “Russian interference” in 2016 — itself a hoax, but one believed as a religious item among Trump’s most ideologically deranged opponents.

Nobody has ever been properly punished for this, save by loss of face in the eyes of conservatives and Trump supporters, who already held them in utter contempt. Now they have been by Trump, with complete justification, and frankly it’s not enough in my opinion: The mere revocation of security clearances should mark the beginning of a proper shaming for these 49 men and women, not the end of it. They are guilty of abusing their trust and the oaths they took to America, of nakedly politicizing the intelligence community, and in so doing irrevocably tarring its reputation for half the nation. (Voters make easy assumptions that the attitudes of the intelligence community’s leadership are shared by lower-level analysts; they do so properly, because that is indeed the easiest way to survive and rise in a surprisingly risk-averse field.)

Make no mistake: This is a crippling professional blow to all of these people, who make their money post-retirement by trading on the access to information those clearances give them. (This is where ex-intel officers make their actual money — post-retirement, at think-tanks, academic sinecures, or consulting — not the federal government, which pays relatively little even at a GS-15 Step 10 pay level.) And they richly earned it. Trump for once speaks entirely without hyperbole when he accuses the signatories of leveraging their national security credibility — and the power of their institutions; the letter was submitted to the CIA’s prepublication review and approved — to perpetuate falsehood.

Over at The Atlantic, Graeme Wood writes about this topic — and, rather surprisingly, agrees with most of my arguments — and concludes that it turns out it’s a bad idea to sign open letters (and particularly this one). This is correct enough as far as it goes. But in truth, it was a far worse idea for the signatories to abjure their professional duties and so crassly discard their ethical responsibilities in order to embrace politics instead. The fact that they did so erroneously is almost a distraction; they should never have spoken in the first place. They forgot who they are supposed to be, and we all suffer for it.