There is a fundamental lack of understanding as to how clearances work. A person with NSC level clearance would have access to virtually all secrets short of those for the President’s eyes only.
You could lose that and still have “read in” clearance into almost any program on a need to know basis.
I was “read into” the National Aerospace Plane program, a secret hypersonic aircraft program-—but I had no access whatsoever to the B-2, or cruise missile, or anything else.
People ought to be a little restrained before jumping to conclusions that x or y “won” any power struggle.
Isn’t most classified info accessed on a need-to-know basis? IOW, if you don’t need to know it, you don’t get to see it, no matter what your security clearance is? If Bannon still has access to the POTUS, could this action be to protect Bannon?
Not only that, Bannon probably doesn’t want or need all the pings and alerts that come with clearance to the NSC. He seems satisfied, via his statement, that all is going well with NSC now.
You should know that as a Rickover Officer I was part of Spec Op missions where my security clearance was upgraded to a level in which een the name of the classification was itself classified.
Top Secret is not the highest clearance, not by a long shot.
What I drew attention to was not the change in security classifications, but instead, why was Drudge making a headline of Bannon losing a level of security clearance and had his headline link to the Bloomberg piece which had no mention of any security clearance change.
Obviously, Bannon as a close advisor still retains a level of clearance with the President. If he has a change in NSC clearance, it is only to limit the distribution of NSC classified material. Bannon has no need to know, and in fact anyone without a ‘need to know’ will not be on the distribution list. Those lists are required to be tightly controlled and managed.
So this is much ado about nothing. But Bloomberg has a different motive.
After digesting the impact of the headlline, here is my take. I have confidence that it is accurate:
“The Bannon headline by Bloomberg is an attempt to create a false narrative of chaos in the White House. Because so many lefties are salivating at sacking Bannon, the NY-based Bloomberg will surely dominate the news cycle and DISTRACT FROM THE SUSAN RICE DEVELOPMENTS.”
Bannon was in this position to keep an eye on Flynn which is no longer needed what is interesting to me however is that Trump felt the need all along to keep an eye on Flynn???? Very Interesting!!!!