Just give him the damn secrets already
No surprise, but still horrifying. The (non-)mystery of Prince Jared’s security clearance is solved:
President Trump ordered his chief of staff to grant his son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, a top-secret security clearance last year, overruling concerns flagged by intelligence officials and the White House’s top lawyer, four people briefed on the matter said.
Sure, that’s fine – that scummy little weasel of a real estate hustler can’t possibly do any harm with access to top-secret intelligence, any more than his wife’s father can do any harm with access to top-secret intelligence and nuclear weapons.
Mr. Trump’s decision in May so troubled senior administration officials that at least one, the White House chief of staff at the time, John F. Kelly, wrote a contemporaneous internal memo about how he had been “ordered” to give Mr. Kushner the top-secret clearance.
The White House counsel at the time, Donald F. McGahn II, also wrote an internal memo outlining the concerns that had been raised about Mr. Kushner — including by the C.I.A. — and how Mr. McGahn had recommended that he not be given a top-secret clearance.
Yeah great. They wrote memos. That’ll fix everything.
Trump lied to the Times about it last month. Of course he did.
Kushner’s lawyer lied about it. Princess Ivanka lied about it.
Asked on Thursday about the memos contradicting the president’s account, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, said, “We don’t comment on security clearances.”
We hand them out to criminals and gangsters, and we lie to anyone who asks us about it, but we don’t comment. Peasants.
Mr. Kushner has spent this week abroad working on a Middle East peace plan. Among his meetings was one with Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia.
He’s not qualified to be “working on a Middle East peace plan.” He’s a crooked little weasel with no relevant education or training or experience. He should be selling cheap condos in Pierre, South Dakota.
Memos. Arse covering in other words.
I’m not totally sure anyone is qualified to work on a Middle East Peace plan; that region has so many diplomatic land mines, it might take the combined years of experience of our entire diplomatic corp to get that much experience and knowledge.
As for Kushner, he is arguably one of the least qualified to work on it. My Irish terrier is much more to be qualified, and he refuses to travel to any country where people don’t eat bacon.
@Rob #1 – I can’t bring myself to agree with that.
If you work for a boss who you think is taking a bad course of action, you should push back against them as much as you can. It looks like Kelly did that. But at the end of the day, the boss is the boss and gets to make the decisions – and it’s always possible that they know more than you do and are making the decision for reasons you are not aware of. Disagreeing with your boss on some issues is expected – no two people ever agree 100% on the same course of action every time. So you have to let some things go, and do your best to give your boss the best information you can for the next decision they have to make.
But sometimes, even if you have to let things go, it’s worth putting your objections on the record for your successor, or your boss’s successor. If things go bad down the line, it’s valuable knowing which decisions were the bad ones, and who made them, and why they made them, even if only to be able to see if processes could be put in place to prevent that sort of mistake from happening again. Or to see who should face criminal charges.
In that case, you don’t want to end up with a finger-pointing he-said/she-said “I made the best decision I could, someone should have warned me it was a bad one”, “I did warn you”, “No you didn’t, you must be misremembering, that was 30 years ago!”.
So I don’t think that writing a memo is just about about CYA, I think it can be a deliberate guide for future historians looking to untangle the complexity of the present.
Karellen, this is a long standing debate issue. Yes, the boss has power. But who is responsible for an action, the one who orders it or the one who does it? We have seen the use of this argument in the “just doing my job” rationalization of the Nazis during the Nuremberg trials. There are a lot of people who see this as a valid excuse. There are a lot of people who do not.
Sometimes doing the right thing may mean disobeying orders. It may mean quitting, rather than remaining in a situation where you are required to do things that are wrong or bad; and don’t use the “change from within” and they thought they could do more good by remaining and trying to help steer the ship on the right course. By that time, I doubt anyone with two brain cells thought they could make any changes in the Trump course. They were simply wanting to hold onto power over other people, make sure things ran in the (somewhat nasty) manner they wanted them to run, and protect their income.
It could be argued that this is a false analogy, that giving a patently unqualified crony a security clearance is not the same as sticking 6 million Jews into death chambers. Yeah, sure, I agree. But the potential long term consequences could be as bad, or even worse, when Mr. Unqualified meddles in tense situations among states which are, at least in some cases, heavily armed in a region not known for political stability.
So, yeah, I’ll have to agree with Rob on this one. It’s strictly a CYA.
Karellen, in a normal organisational setting where there are probably multiple options based on strategy and desired outcomes and where the boss has to make the call, sure document your position for future learning (and CYA). This isn’t that situation at all. There was no open debate. No multiple valid options requiring judgement. No valid future learning. As Iknklast notes, the stakes are high and the upside to staying on rests only with people who were in a position to walk as honour and probity demanded. They didn’t, but they want history to be kind to them. I suspect it will not be.
Iknklast, you agree with me this time? Gasp! I thought this was an echo chamber.
@Iknklast, @Rob – thanks for the added nuance. I’ve swayed closer to your way of seeing things than before, even if I’m not totally convinced yet. There’s definitely an element of CYA there.