The weaponization of security clearances

OPINION:

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Twenty-seven months ago, the FBI suspended the security clearance of employee Marcus Allen after he questioned the agency’s handling of the Jan. 6 investigations. When congressional Republicans questioned the official who signed the clearance suspension, Jennifer Leigh Moore, she testified that the FBI “does not use a suspension as a punitive measure ever.” Ms. Moore returned to Capitol Hill a short time later to say that the Department of Justice had revoked Mr. Allen’s clearance because he had “expressed sympathy” for people who sought to obstruct the government by illegal means.

Mr. Allen’s fate would have been sealed had his advocates not persuaded the department’s inspector general to look into the case. The Justice Department has yet to release the investigation report, but we know that it vindicated Mr. Allen, for it led the Justice Department to reinstate his security clearance and compensate him for lost pay. It turns out that the FBI had used the security clearance system in a punitive manner, and on false pretenses.

Mr. Allen’s case extends a larger pattern of the weaponization of the security clearance system against political opponents. It also provides further evidence of two-tiered justice, whereby supporters of former President Donald Trump are punished on dubious or unsubstantiated charges while Democrats go unpunished. Attorney General Merrick Garland just gave another example by flouting the same type of congressional subpoena that he prosecuted former White House aides Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro for flouting.

Congress has repeatedly tried to increase the transparency and accountability of the security clearance apparatus in order to prevent its weaponization, but thus far with little success. The security clearance system remains so vulnerable to abuse, first of all, because a very small number of people hold the power to revoke clearances. The abuser of authority may be an agency head, or a senior official in an agency’s office of security.

In 2012, the inspector general of the Securities and Exchange Commission investigated the head of the commission’s security office, William S. Fagan, for criminal offenses that included steering contracts to cronies, covering up sexual assault and orchestrating reprisals against whistleblowers. Mr. Fagan turned the tables on the inspector general by using vague complaints to declare that Assistant Inspector General David P. Weber posed a “physical threat” to other staff, resulting in Mr. Weber’s suspension. Although an external investigation cleared Mr. Weber of the charge, agency leaders ignored its findings and fired him.

At the U.S. Agency for International Development, where I worked during the Trump administration, the FBI investigated the office of security’s leaders in 2016 after receiving reports that they were planting phony evidence as pretexts for labeling their bureaucratic adversaries “insider threats.” The FBI investigation ultimately resulted in the ousting of the office director, his deputy and four other officials.

The clearance system’s second vulnerability is the wide latitude afforded to decision-makers. Federal guidelines provide a list of transgressions that can warrant revoking a clearance, and a list of “mitigating conditions” that can offset them. A malicious adjudicator can give great weight to a relatively minor infraction while ignoring major mitigating conditions.

Conversely, a biased adjudicator can spare a favored person who committed serious offenses by giving greater weight to “mitigating conditions” of doubtful importance. The  Department of Defense relied on such subterfuge to revoke the security clearance of Adam Lovinger for a trivial offense while ignoring more serious infractions by Biden administration official Colin Kahl.

The system’s third major vulnerability is the frailty of its whistleblower protections. In 2019, USAID suspended my security clearance and then fired me based on an unsubstantiated accusation by a two-star general. When I filed a whistleblower complaint with the USAID Office of Inspector General, the agency’s “whistleblower protection coordinator” wrote back that I was not eligible for whistleblower protections because the agency had not completed the clearance adjudication process. The CIA had previously wheeled out this same argument to deny whistleblower protections to one of its employees, Andrew Bakaj, and had been shot down by an external inspector general.

The Defense Department restored my clearance one year later, but when USAID officials heard about it, they persuaded friends at the Pentagon to revoke my clearance. Federal regulations and policy directives stipulate that when the government revokes an individual’s security clearance, it must give the individual the “documents, records, and reports upon which a denial or revocation is based,” yet the Defense Department and USAID refused to turn these materials over. At nearly the same time, the Defense Department pulled similar stunts on two other Trump supporters, Michael Ellis and Katie Arrington. My ensuing lawsuit, filed more than two years ago, has yet to compel the government’s compliance.

To stop the abuses, Congress must turn executive orders and regulations into laws that the executive branch cannot ignore. It should also pass new legislation permitting whistleblowers to sue for abuses of the security clearance system. The authority to revoke clearances must be removed from agency officials because of their vested interests and personal connections, and given to an independent body. In protecting specific individuals, such legislation will also dissipate the climate of fear that currently discourages government employees from reporting waste, fraud and abuse.

• Mark Moyar is the author of “Masters of Corruption: How the Federal Bureaucracy Sabotaged the Trump Presidency.”