Kel McClanahan is the executive director of National Security Counselors, and an adjunct professor at the American University Washington College of Law, where he teaches National Security Law and Practice. He can be found on Twitter at @NatlSecCnslrs.

On Monday, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders announced that President Donald Trump is considering revoking the security clearances of six high-ranking former national security officials who’ve been critical of his administration, including former CIA Director John Brennan, former FBI Director James Comey and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. The reasoning behind this potentially unprecedented action is an allegation that these individuals are “monetizing their clearances”—whatever that means—and using their status to say scurrilous things about the president and leak classified information to the media.

Even giving the absolute benefit of the doubt to the president—which, at this point, he has decidedly not earned—this course of action makes no sense whatsoever. What the president is considering would have zero effect on the perceived problem the White House has described, while having enormous repercussions throughout the intelligence community and anyone considering joining it.


Normally, when a person with a security clearance is in government service (which can include work as a contractor), they have what is known as an “active” security clearance of whatever level they’ve been granted (Secret, Top Secret, TS/SCI, etc.). That means that on any given day, that person has the general eligibility to access any information classified at that level or below. However, that eligibility doesn’t allow them to access everything at that level of classification; in order to see a specific piece of classified information, they must have the “need to know” it, which is best understood as “I need this information in order to achieve the purpose for which the government gave me the clearance.” (This is why, for instance, upon being hired by the CIA, every new employee with a clearance doesn’t suddenly get to go read secret UFO records.)

When that individual leaves government service, they don’t lose their clearance; it becomes “inactive.” For a certain period of time, generally a year or so, it’s considered both “inactive” and “current,” meaning that anyone who wants to hire them for classified work can basically flip a switch and that person is back to full power. After that time, their clearance “lapses” or becomes fully inactive, which generally means that they’ll have to go through a new investigation before accessing classified information.

What does all this mean in the context of Trump’s threat to strip clearances? Let’s dive right in.

The first question being thrown around is simple: Why do these former officials have clearances in the first place? There are two possible answers. The first is as I said above: They still have inactive clearances from their government service. It’s the reason that people can leave the CIA, apply for work elsewhere and say, “My clearance is still current.” It doesn’t mean they’re using it; it just means they have it. (It’s worth noting that most agencies’ policies call for someone’s clearance to be “deactivated” when they leave government service.)

But there’s a second possibility that applies to former senior officials like the ones Trump is targeting: directors of intelligence community components will have unique insights into the work of their agencies, and their expertise can and should be tapped by their successors, who historically have called upon their predecessors for guidance. For that reason, many such officials retain their active clearances simply so they can be called on at a moment’s notice to provide their thoughts, though this is not a universal rule. But speculation or even outright statements from these officials that they no longer have clearances should not be taken as proof of such unless they absolutely cannot be read as confusion over “active” and “inactive” status.

The second major question speaks to the rationale the White House has articulated for this potential action. According to Trump aides and allies, there are two reasons these specific former officials should not be allowed to have clearances anymore: one, that people will listen to someone with a clearance, and nobody should listen to these officials; and two, that they leak classified information to the media.

Let’s take these in turn.

The idea that these officials’ security clearances are the reason people are interviewing them, booking them for speaking engagements and buying their books is laughable. It’s a basic truth of life that we tend to give more credence to the opinions of people who know what they are talking about. In this particular case, the fact that the targeted officials were once senior members of the intelligence community is the reason people listen to them. Stripping them of their clearances won’t change the fact of their expertise. Former top national security officials—including those who served in the Reagan, Carter, Ford and Nixon administrations—are still interviewed as experts on the topic despite the fact that most of them probably haven’t had an active clearance in this millennium, yet nobody considers them any less credible.

Moreover, if the goal is to deprive these former officials of an audience, the White House couldn’t do that, even if it wanted. Ironically, though the White House publicly announced that the president was considering stripping the clearances of these six anti-Trump former national security leaders, longstanding government policy holds that if the president actually revoked their clearances, nobody would be able to tell the public. The Privacy Act protects people from the disclosure of personally identifiable information by the government to people not authorized to possess it, and the government has consistently taken a very hard-line position that matters pertaining to a person’s security clearance are among the most protected of all privacy interests.

If the Trump administration decides to revoke their clearances and announce it publicly, it will have ramifications for the administration in ways that will likely displease Trump. For instance, this policy is the entire reason that I am currently tied up in lengthy Freedom of Information Act litigation with various agencies over records pertaining to the clearances of several Trump administration officials. The administration simply cannot have it both ways: If it can’t tell a FOIA requester about the status of one person’s security clearance, then surely it cannot announce to the White House press corps that specific people have had their security clearance revoked. And if they can’t publicly announce the revocation of these security clearances, then the public will never know that they have been revoked, which will naturally have zero effect on how the public perceives the critiques of Comey, Clapper and company.

The other stated rationale for Trump’s action is equally disconnected from the proposed corrective action. Let’s assume for the sake of argument that these officials are leaking classified information to the press. Taking away their clearances won’t do anything to change that. They’re not getting new classified information, because they don’t have the “need to know” unless they’re being actively consulted by the agencies on those matters. Any classified information being leaked would be drawn from the things these ex-officials already knew back when their clearances were active. Revoking their clearances won’t make them any less able to reveal this information; it’s a clearance revocation, not a lobotomy. (Plus, if they were revealing classified information, there’s no “but I have a clearance” legal defense. And, if anything, criminal cases generally tend to go worse for leakers with security clearances than those without them.)

We have a situation where, based on the White House’s stated reasons for considering the action, revoking these security clearances would have no actual effect on the stated causes. This “solution” would do nothing to solve the “problem,” and would in fact simply create more problems.

The current security-clearance regime is set out in Executive Order 12,968. As we have seen amply over the past year, an executive order can be issued, revoked or ignored with the stroke of a president’s pen, and as long as it does not contradict a law, that’s the end of the discussion. According to E.O. 12,968, a security clearance cannot be revoked without cause or without due process, but because this rule is a creation of the executive branch, many would argue that it doesn’t actually apply to the president himself. Just as a president can grant a security clearance to anyone he chooses for whatever reason he wants, there’s an argument to be made that he can strip one from anyone he chooses for equally dubious reasons.

At first blush, one would think this legal framework would only encourage the president to revoke these clearances, but the reality is a little more subtle. Though the current security clearance regime is set out in an executive order, there is no concrete reason that it has to be. Congress could well choose to draft a statute addressing this matter over the objections of the executive branch. In both the Freedom of Information Act and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, Congress chose to ignore the oppositional posturing of the executive, showing that it can and does legislate issues about classified information and security clearances. And while many people, myself included, think a statute-governed security-clearance system would be a welcome development, the prospect of losing unitary control over the clearance system should give the White House pause.

If Trump follows through on his threat, we are left with two equally uncomfortable possible conclusions. The first possibility is that the president has decided to ignore all of the evidence and take an action that will do nothing to address the problem he thinks he faces. The second is that the president is not actually taking this action for the reasons the White House has told the public.

Either answer will yield the same result. It will hurl a grenade into the intelligence community, telling anyone even thinking of working there that their clearances and livelihoods can be stripped away without any due process if they ever criticize the administration—even if they leave government service. It will, perhaps, light a fire under Congress to make sure this sort of unilateral action without due process cannot happen again, which will have all sorts of ripple effects on the dynamic between the legislative and executive branches. And it won’t actually accomplish a single thing the White House wants.