A whistleblower from inside the White House has told congressional investigators that senior Trump administration officials granted national security clearances to at least 25 people that government reviewers had rejected for an array of concerns.
The whistleblower, Tricia Newbold, said the officials, cleared for security credentials after career employees recommended they be denied, include two current unnamed senior White House officials, government contractors, and other staff aides working for the office of President Donald Trump.
Newbold, an 18-year veteran of the security clearance process under both Republican and Democratic presidents, last month told investigators for the House Oversight and Reform Committee that while Trump had the right as president to overrule career employees' denials of the security badges, the officials' clearances "were not always adjudicated in the best interest of national security."
The committee chairman, Congressman Elijah Cummings, told the panel's members that Newbold told investigators that those eventually cleared by senior Trump administration officials "had a wide range of serious disqualifying issues involving foreign influence, conflicts of interest, concerning personal conduct, financial problems, drug use, and criminal conduct."
Newbold told investigators she had been suspended for 14 days without pay earlier this year after protesting internally about the way in which the security clearance denials had been overturned and now was worried about returning to work after she decided to go public with her concerns.
"I'm terrified of going back," she told investigators. "I know that this will not be perceived in favor of my intentions, which is to bring back the integrity of the office."
But Newbold said she decided to become a whistleblower because "I would not be doing a service to myself, my country, or my children if I sat back knowing that the issues that we have could impact national security."
Cummings's memo on Newbold's statements to investigators did not identify any of the officials who have been granted security clearances against the recommendations of the security reviewers.
News accounts earlier this year said that Trump had personally intervened last year to overrule then White House chief of staff John Kelly to grant a clearance to Kushner, a move Kelly found so unsettling that he recorded Trump's direction to him in a memo.
Kushner, speaking on Fox News, declined to comment on the White House process, but said that he personally was in compliance.
"I disclosed all of my holdings to the Office of Government Ethics, and what I did with them is they told me what to divest, what to keep, what rules to follow. We followed all that," he said.
Cummings, in a letter to White House counsel Pat Cipollone, said he "has given the White House every possible opportunity to cooperate with the investigation, but you have declined. Your actions are now preventing the committee from obtaining the information it needs to fulfill its constitutional responsibilities."
Cummings said his panel would vote Tuesday to subpoena Newbold's former boss, Carl Kline, who now works at the Defense Department, along with five other current and former White House officials involved with the security reviews to testify about their role in the clearances.
The top Republican on the committee, Rep. Jim Jordan, said Cummings is carrying out a "partisan attack on the president" and using his investigation as "an excuse to go fishing through the personal files of dedicated public servants."
The White House had no immediate comment on the security clearance issues.
