this new reporting explains how that went. this is this is a little nuts. quote, the white house office only determines eligibility for secret and top secret clearances. above that level, the cia is the agency that decides whether to grant sci, whether to grant, what is it, sensitive compartmented information to officials after the cia conducts a further background check. the initial request was made by the white house and then it went to the fbi for a background investigation. and that is where the problems reportedly arose. kushner s fbi background check identified questions about his family s business, his foreign contacts, his foreign travel and meetings he had had during the campaign the sources said. declining to be more specific. i will just note here that this sort of comports with other
influence. it s not a stretch, right? it is not that much of a surprise, given all the other open-source reporting we have seen on that front. but what is a surprise and what is brand-new here is what nbc news says happened next. following the fbi investigation, the case went back to the white house office of personnel security, where a career adjudicator reviewed the fbi information, including questions about foreign influence and foreign business entanglements. on the basis of potential foreign influence, the adjudicator deemed kushner s application unfavorable and then handed it to a supervisor. the supervisor agreed with the unfavorable determination and then gave it to carl kline, the newly installed head of the office who overallruled the unfavorable determination and approved kushner for top secret security clearance. now, at this point, this trump installed official being put in
reporting that we ve got, right? we know that two days into the trump administration jared kushner initially applied for a security clearance and listed no foreign contacts. yeah, not even like the trump tower meeting and not even like the meeting with the sanctioned russian bank ceo. nothing. he listed nothing. we know that he had to revise his security clearance application more than 40 times over the course of him starting his employment at the white house. we know that the new yorker and the wall street journal last year both reported that the fbi had come to the trump white house specifically to warn them that jared was the target of foreign influence operations. the washington post also reported last year in february that at least four different countries had been heard by u.s. intelligence agencies strategizing amongst themselves over ways they knew they could manipulate and compromise jared kushner to get him to do their bidding. so the fbi background check on kushner tur
to run that office at this point, having having had that official grant jared kushner top secret clearance, this white house official appointed by trump did that. despite the red flags turned by the fbi, by the career people who review fbi information at the white house, i mean, the career people who review this information at the white house at two different levels looked at what the fbi turned up on jared kushner and were like, no way, don t do this. but nevertheless, this trump installed official says, i don t care, i m overruling you, give him his top secret clearance anyway. then what did they do next? the white house decided, you know what, actually, all we can do is give him a top secret clearance, but let s try to get him the even higher level of clearance, too. let s go to the cia and see if we can get him the really good one. quote, as a very senior official, kushner was seeking an even higher designation that would grant him access to what is known as sci. that material
happened at the white house, this overruling of career officials on the basis of fbi background information, that had happened once in three years before this particularly supervisor got there. nbc says he did it at least 30 times. is that as much a break from standard practice as it sounds? i ll say this, in 12 years of representing people across the intelligence community, defense contractors, government personnel, military personnel, i ve never seen this. it doesn t mean it doesn t happen. i m certain there are certain exceptions of the rule. there s been times that it s happened, you know, over various decades that we ve had clearances, but the fact that it was done here, this is what we always feared. this is what we were worried was going to happen when the president broke with the custom of not having not bridge bringing his kids in, not bringing family. this is what we feared was going to happen. they brought jared kushner in. they brought ivanka trump in. there were obviou