Rep. Elijah Cummings is requesting information on any problems or issues that arose in the security clearance processes. | Alex Wong/Getty Images Legal House Dems launch investigation into Trump administration's use of security clearances

House Democratic investigators launched a probe on Wednesday into the Trump administration’s use of security clearances and temporary security clearances, accusing the White House of playing fast and loose with the nation’s most guarded secrets.

Oversight Chairman Elijah Cummings laid out several lines of inquiry on the matter in a letter to the White House, naming former national security adviser Michael Flynn and top officials who he wrote should have raised red flags.


The panel will press the White House to provide Congress with information about how and why it issued some security clearances, which Democrats note is required under federal law. Democrats have said the White House has so far refused to provide that information. Several inquiries on the same issue went unanswered by the administration last year.

“The goals of this investigation are to determine why the White House and Transition Team appear to have disregarded established procedures for safeguarding classified information, evaluate the extent to which the nation’s most highly guarded secrets were provided to officials who should not have had access to them, and develop reforms to remedy the flaws in current White House systems and practices,” Cummings wrote.

Cummings cites former chief of staff John Kelly’s acknowledgment of “shortcomings” in the security clearance process and Kelly’s suggestion that the Trump administration “take a hard look” at how the White House handles clearances.

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Cummings is requesting information on any problems or issues that arose in the security clearance processes for multiple individuals, including Flynn, who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his interactions with Russia; Flynn's son Michael Flynn Jr.; former deputy national security adviser K.T. McFarland; national security adviser John Bolton; Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser; Rob Porter, the former White House staff secretary who left amid allegations of spousal abuse; former National Security Council senior director Robin Townley; Trump’s personal assistant John McEntee; and former deputy assistant to the president Sebastian Gorka.

The letter also requests any documents and information gathered from Kelly’s own internal review of the security clearance process last year, “which reportedly found that 34 White House officials who had started working on the first day of the Trump Administration were still working with interim security clearances as of November 2017 and that more than 130 political appointees in the Executive Office of the President were working with interim security clearances as of that date,” the Cummings wrote.

