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Clearance was downgraded in february of 2018 after a review of the clearance process they felt like john kelly and don mcgahn were targeting them for petty reasons, not for anything legitimate. the fbi and the cia during the course of jared kushner s background check had flagged concerns. among those concerns was that he had not disclosed initially open his application for security clearance some contacts with foreign officials, including a meeting with a russian banker during the transition. jared kushner s folks said that was a clerical error, that it was fixed overtime. but there was concerns flagged by intelligence officials about questions of whether he would be susceptible to foreign influence. they noted how many interactions with foreign governments and officials that he personally had as well as due to his family s real estate. and this went on for a very long time. it was a source of enormous frustration for the white house that jared kushner s security clearance is getting s ....
This report in the new york times, the report that president trump ordered his chief of staff john kelly to grant his son-in-law and senior adviser jared kushner a top secret security clearance last year overruling concerns flagged by intelligence officials and the white house top lawyer don mcgahn. joining us now to discuss this and much more, michael smerconish, the host of smerconish. thanks so much for being with us this morning. you ve read the report and listened to some of the coverage and you have a slightly different take on what s most important here. what do you see? well, i think that all of the attention on why the president would be, again, at odds with the intelligence community, because that s really what this is about, is worthy of interest. but i keep wondering what is it about jared kushner that created all these questions to begin with? is it the meeting at trump tower with the woman who was arriving promising dirt on hillary clinton? is it the meeting that he n ....
Clearances. candidly i felt there was a real chance when i asked them that question that he was going to say, yes drer , he did do it. i assumed that is what he was going to say, that he chose not to for whatever reason. again, we don t know. it is within his authority to say regardless of what people think of it, jared kushner is who i want to have looking at middle east peace and looking at a host of other global issues and therefore he needs this clearance because he can t do his job without it. they could have just said that and they chose not to. so now let s get to why people in the intel community and beyond were so concerned. why didn t chief of staff then john kelly want jared to have this? why didn t don mcgahn, white house counsel at the time want him to have this? why didn t the fbi and the cia think that this was appropriate for jared kushner? so i should note here that according to our reporting, we reported this past last year, jared kushner and ivanka trump were ver ....