I decided to hold off comment on this story from the Washington Post in which we discover that, overruling the people who actually know what they're talking about, the president* started handing our security clearances like chocolate eggs at Easter to all of his family members, his hangers-on, the hangers-on who hang on his family members, and to Zombie Yuri Andropov, as far as anyone knows. I held off until the administration* response appeared, largely because I know it was going to be incomprehensibly lame and, at being incomprehensively lame, unlike in so many other areas, this administration* rarely disappoints.

Ms. Newbold testified that only 4-5 of her unfavorable 25 adjudications were for 'very serious reasons.'

That's the best they had? Only 20 percent of these dubious security clearances on which the White House overruled the career experts were for "very serious" reasons?

Ms. Newbold is Tricia Newbold, a national-security lifer tasked with passing on high security clearance procedures in the executive branch. According to the Post, Newbold has become a whistleblower, having testified before the House Oversight Committee.

Tricia Newbold, a longtime White House security adviser, told the House Oversight and Reform Committee that she and her colleagues issued “dozens” of denials for security clearance applications that were later approved despite their concerns about blackmail, foreign influence or other red flags, according to panel documents released Monday.

Newbold, an 18-year veteran of the security clearance process who has served under both Republican and Democratic presidents, said she warned her superiors that clearances “were not always adjudicated in the best interest of national security” — and was retaliated against for doing so.

“I would not be doing a service to myself, my country, or my children if I sat back knowing that the issues that we have could impact national security,” Newbold told the committee, according to a panel document summarizing her allegations. Newbold added: “I feel that right now this is my last hope to really bring the integrity back into our office.”

I have made it a practice not to lean too heavily on any argument that begins, "Imagine if Obama..." But seriously, imagine if Obama had arranged things in this way. Republicans in the Congress would have burned the Capitol down. To absolutely nobody's surprise, Republicans leaped to the defense of...the administration.

In a statement, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), the top Republican on the House Oversight Committee, accused Cummings of politicizing an issue that should be bipartisan. “Chairman Cummings’ investigation is not about restoring integrity to the security clearance process, it is an excuse to go fishing through the personal files of dedicated public servants,” Jordan said.

Jim Jordan Tom Williams Getty Images

“The process by which this matter has so far progressed has been anything but fair...Chairman Cummings has departed from longstanding bipartisan oversight of the security clearance process to advance his partisan efforts to attack the President. His unilateral decision to release cherry-picked excerpts from one witness so early into an investigation is far from the constructive oversight he promised."

Ms. Newbold herself has become the target of the completely predictable character assault from the usual suspects. It was leaked that she had been suspended for two weeks earlier this year; according to Newbold and reported by Tim Mak of NPR, this was officially because of a clerical error she had made in a new filing system, but she said it was retaliation for her bringing her misgivings on the clearances up through what we may laughingly call the chain of command in Camp Runamuck. (According to Mak, Newbold, who has a rare form of dwarfism, told him that one of her supervisors had ridiculed her for her small stature. Classy.) And they didn't even try to craft a decent lie. That's where we are. We are unworthy of state-of-the-art mendacity.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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