In May, after months working under an interim clearance, Jared Kushner’s request for a permanent security clearance, which would allow him to see top-secret material, was finally granted. At the time, observers took this as an indication that Donald Trump’s son-in-law, who’d reportedly attracted Robert Mueller’s attention for his ties to various foreign entities, was in the clear. On Thursday, however, an NBC News report threw that conclusion into doubt. In fact, two sources familiar with the matter told the outlet, Kushner’s clearance was only approved because Trump’s handpicked director of security personnel overruled two career White House security specialists, who had recommended against Kushner receiving top-secret clearance after seeing the results of his F.B.I. background check.

Kushner’s case represents a worrisome pattern for the White House. Per NBC, Trump’s director of security, Carl Kline, overruled security experts in at least 30 cases, recommending that Trump officials be granted clearances despite troubling information uncovered in their background checks. (The sources noted that the Trump White House “attracted many people with untraditional backgrounds who had complicated financial and personal histories, some of which raised red flags.”) That number is indeed extraordinary. Prior to the Trump administration, White House security experts had only been overruled once in the past three years. (The White House told NBC, “We don’t comment on security clearances.” A C.I.A. spokesman said the same, and Kushner’s lawyer, Abbe Lowell, had “no comment.” Kline, a former Pentagon employee, could not be reached for comment.)

Denying a security clearance to a White House official, noted Daniel Jacobson, a former lawyer in Barack Obama’s administration, is not something that’s done lightly. “It is not normal for the head of the Personal Security Office to ever overrule the career employees who adjudicate clearances,” he wrote on Twitter. “It takes some pretty bad stuff to be denied a clearance. The fact that there have been thirty denial recommendations of WH staff in the last 1.5 years is itself crazy, before you even get to the overruling part.”

After he was cleared by the White House, Kushner’s file was reportedly submitted to the C.I.A. to be evaluated for an S.C.I., or “sensitive compartmented information” clearance—an even higher designation. It didn’t go well:

After reviewing the file, C.I.A. officers who make clearance decisions balked, two of the people familiar with the matter said. One called over to the White House security division, wondering how Kushner got even a top-secret clearance, the sources said.

Given his various entanglements, the C.I.A.’s alarm makes sense. As The Washington Post reported last year, the president’s son-in-law is viewed by several foreign countries—the United Arab Emirates, Mexico, China, and Israel among them—as a potentially manipulable asset, given his fraught business dealings and his notable lack of political experience. Along with his communications with Russia during the transition, which caught Mueller’s attention, Kushner helped establish a back channel with the U.A.E. while supporting a blockade against Qatar, and has maintained a close personal friendship with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who reportedly bragged last spring that he had Kushner “in his pocket” after Kushner allegedly turned over a list of Saudi dissidents being monitored by the U.S. (Kushner’s team has called this allegation “obviously false and ridiculous”; shortly after the gruesome death of Jamal Khashoggi, Kushner apparently became a reliable defender of the crown prince within the White House.)

Presumably, some or all of these dealings factored into career officials’ recommendation that Kushner be denied a security clearance. “They would not do that lightly for someone of Kushner’s stature and position,” Jacobson wrote. “The fact that the C.I.A. then denied his S.C.I. application is equally damning,” he added. “And the fact that they were so disturbed by the granting of his [top secret] clearance that they called over to the WH? Hooboy.”

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