Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner struggled for more than a year-and-a-half to get security clearance before it was abruptly announced last spring that he had finally been given a pass.
However, now House Democrats say they plan to investigate just what was holding up Kushner’s security clearance for so long — and what happened that finally tipped the scales and granted him full clearance.
“The Committee on Oversight and Reform is launching an in-depth investigation of the security clearance process at the White House and Transition Team in response to grave breaches of national security at the highest levels of the Trump Administration,” Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD), the Chairman of the Committee on Oversight and Reform, said in a letter to the White House obtained by NBC News.
Kushner gained security clearance last year despite the fact that he had “omitted” hundreds of contacts with foreign officials in his initial security clearance application forms.
When Kushner first filed his SF-86 form shortly after President Donald Trump’s election in 2016, it listed precisely zero contacts with foreign officials. After it became clear that Kushner had actually met with many foreign officials during the presidential campaign, however, he amended his form to reflect more than 100 contacts.
Kushner subsequently amended the form once again after it was revealed that he met with Russian attorney Natalia Veselnitskaya, who had met with him based on the promise that she had damaging information on Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.
Charles Phalen, the director of the National Background Investigations Bureau, told lawmakers at a House subcommittee oversight hearing held in 2017 that he had “never seen that level of mistakes” on a security clearance application than what he had seen from Kushner’s original SF-86.
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