Trump official 'overrules' rejection of Jared Kushner's top security clearance

A Trump administration personnel official overruled intelligence experts who had denied top-secret security clearance for Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, HuffPost reports, citing NBC.

Kushner’s clearance was denied twice by two White House security experts because of FBI concerns about foreign influence on Kushner, according to NBC. But they were overruled by Carl Kline when he was installed as the director of the personnel security office of the president, the network reported.

Kline also overruled security experts on 30 other people in the Trump administration, an unprecedented number, unnamed officials told NBC. Such a situation had occurred only once before in the previous three years.

Kushner is one of a number of high-level administration members whose security clearances are being investigated by the House Oversight Committee. House officials have accused the Trump administration of disregarding security clearance protocols and causing “grave breaches of national security at the highest levels,” according to a statement released Wednesday by committee chairman Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.).

In response to the NBC report, Cummings issued a statement late Thursday saying the committee expects the White House to turn over all pertinent documents involving Kushner’s clearance.

“The system is supposed to be a nonpartisan determination of an individual’s fitness to hold a clearance, not an ad hoc approach that overrules career experts to give the President’s family members access to our nation’s most sensitive secrets,” said the statement.

The investigation seeks to determine why the White House and the presidential transition team “appear to have disregarded established procedures for safeguarding classified information [and] evaluate the extent to which the nation’s most highly guarded secrets were provided to officials who should not have had access to them,” Cummings wrote to White House counsel Pat Cipollone. It will also look into why the White House is “defying federal law” by failing to provide Congress information about its security clearance process, the letter states.