A pair of House Democrats on Thursday called on acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney to revoke Jared Kushner’s security clearance.
The letter to Mulvaney from Democratic Reps. Don Beyer (Va.) and Ted Lieu (Calif.) came after NBC News reported last week that two career White House security specialists rejected Kushner’s application for a top-secret security clearance after an FBI background check raised concerns about potential foreign influence. Their supervisor overruled them and approved the clearance anyway, according to NBC.
{mosads}”We urge you to immediately revoke the security clearance of Senior White House Advisor Jared Kushner, and to comply with past and future oversight requests from Congress related to security clearances, information security, and other matters of national security,” Beyer and Lieu wrote.
They further accused the administration of concealing information from Congress about security clearances.
“The ongoing refusal of the Administration to abide by longstanding security clearance processes, coupled with its unwillingness to explain its actions to Members of Congress, increasingly seems like a coverup,” they wrote.
Sources told NBC that Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law and White House adviser, was one of at least 30 cases in which the official overruled career security experts and approved clearances for incoming Trump administration officials. The sources said that the number of decisions overruling the rejections was unprecedented.
Beyer and Lieu have previously called for Kushner’s security clearance to be revoked. They did so in 2017, after reports emerged that Kushner and his wife, Ivanka Trump, used private email for official business and missed deadlines for reporting financial assets to the Office of Government Ethics.
Beyer and Lieu’s latest call comes as Democrats on the House Oversight and Reform Committee investigate the security clearance process in the Trump administration.
House Oversight Committee Chairman Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) earlier this month requested information from the White House about security clearance issues involving multiple current and former officials, including Kushner, ex-national security adviser Michael Flynn, former White House staff secretary Robert Porter and former deputy assistant to the president Sebastian Gorka.