This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

A powerful House committee now led by Democrats has launched an investigation into the Trump administration’s use of security clearances, accusing the White House and the 2016 presidential transition team of “grave breaches” in the process that awards access to some of the nation’s most closely guarded secrets.

The inquiry by the House oversight and reform committee, announced on Wednesday, takes direct aim at some of those closest to the president over the past two years, including the former national security adviser Michael Flynn, Trump son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner and former White House aide Rob Porter.

The review also sets up one of the first potential fights between a Democrat-led House committee and a White House bracing for a number of investigations in the wake of last year’s midterm elections that eroded Republican control in Congress.

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Representative Elijah Cummings of Maryland, the oversight committee chairman, said in a letter to the White House that he was undertaking the investigation in response to “grave breaches of national security at the highest level of the Trump administration”.

“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,” he wrote.

Questions over security clearances have long plagued the Trump White House.

Former national security adviser Michael Flynn maintained a security clearance even after lying to the FBI about his secret conversations with the Russian ambassador to the US.



Trump’s former staff secretary Rob Porter operated on an interim security clearance despite allegations of spousal abuse.



And the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, was forced to revise his form three times after omitting 100 foreign contacts while applying for top-level security clearance.

That move resulted in Kushner having his access downgraded, though it was restored last May after the completion of his background check.

Jared Kushner granted security clearance after painful process Read more

Cummings has also requested documents pertaining to the former White House chief of staff John Kelly’s own internal review of the security clearance process in 2018, which according to his statement “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”.

In addition to investigating specific security clearances granted to White House officials, Cummings is asking the White House to explain why it has failed to provide Congress with information about its security clearance process as required by a law passed last year. The law required the White House to provide Congress a report on its security clearance procedures by last August.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.