Posted on 03/13/2018 6:50:34 AM PDT by Leaning Right
President Donald Trump’s personal assistant, John McEntee, was escorted out of the White House on Monday, two senior administration officials said. The cause of the firing was an unspecified security issue, said a third White House official with knowledge of the situation.
White House press secretary Sarah Sanders declined to comment saying, “We don’t comment on personnel issues.” McEntee didn’t return a call seeking comment.
McEntee was one of the longest-serving aides to Trump, dating back to the earliest days of the campaign...
(Excerpt) Read more at marketwatch.com ...
Probably a pretty good guess. With his brother working for Mnuchin he probably could have been paid for insider information as another possibility.
Trump is bringing back something the Obama Admin never had ,security clearances
And after the Pats make Bill B. give up Jimmy G., the old GOAT and his family start thinking about retirement?
A QB could be needed in NE QT!
My impression is that about half of the Trump staff probably need only a Secret clearance at the very most. But they walk in at the beginning and kept saying they needed upper-level access.
So they were given the paperwork and told to submit. Having done this several times in my life...you have to go and detail out your finances, your living circumstances, any close friends who are foreigners, and foreign travels. I would speculate in this guys case....he had some details that he just didn’t want to share, and the security folks just said that his paperwork wouldn’t be processed any further. For the chief of staff now....any security clearance is a big red flag episode and you get terminated. This guy’s issue is that he should have stuck with secret clearance only.
I have a friend who had a certain security clearance level. He retired from the Army as a Major and went to work for DOD doing essentially the same job but needing a higher security level. About a year later, I finally got called for an interview with someone from OPM.
It took so long, he had to take a lower level job until his clearance finally came through.
Maybe he thought he was too big for the new rule.
During my working life I had clearances of one level or another for almost 50 years. Typically, if a position requires a clearance and you’re hired for the job you are awarded an Interim clearance while the background checks proceed. Background checks can take a long time to complete and it doesn’t really take much to foil a security clearance. If the clearance cannot be awarded as Final, you can’t have the job. Kinda sounds like what happened here. (During the Interim period though, the standard penalties for leaking or missusing classified info still apply.)
I made frequent visits to a company and got to know the President.
On one visit I asked about him and was told in confidence that he met the new company owners at the air port. He was asked for his credit card and the company car keys.
They left him car less at the airport and was told they would send him his stuff from his office
Cold,,,, very very cold
That is what I think. The FBI and/or whatever agency is supposed to be providing the clearances is taking its sweet time. Also, I suspect that they are tracking down every incident back to someone pushing another child on the playground in kindergarten, whereas for the 0bama administration, there was a great deal of looking the other way and pieces missing from files.
I am betting the later.
There is a new government agency in charge of security clearances and they have mucked up the process so badly the process has stalled.
As of now most government agencies and contractors will only hire people with current clearances as nobody knows when any more new ones will be granted.
“Escort Jeff Sessions out & get someone in there to lock Hillary up.”....
Trump could use that as his number one promise for his next run for POTUS..... hands down, sure thing for his re-election. On the other hand, why wait for 2020, do it NOW.
Does anyone note that Trump administration employees are being denied clearances at a ridiculously higher rate then Obama administration people?
The Obama administration employees featured an Attorney General who had taken over a ROTC building in 1971, former Weathermen and their sympathizers, Clinton flunkies with so much baggage they needed a briefcase to detail their crimes, current heavy drug users, former heavy drug users, and sexual deviants of all stripes.
I remember a few articles about problems with clearances for them. Then it dried up.
Know why? Because the Rats are criminal gangsters, and the people working in the investigations offices were most likely threatened by their enforcers. Clear the decks, get people through the process and don’t cause trouble or we gut you.
Trump’s people aren’t like that so they’re getting rolled by the Obama holdovers for petty crap. Kelley is going along with it because he’s ex-mil, but all he’s doing is making his own people look bad. The Rats in the bureaucracy are smirking because they know they wouldn’t do that to their own people.
Just my take.
You and I agree.
This is a set up. It’s true the clearance process is bogged down like never before, but Trump people are going out the door for nothing.
“Trump’s aide was a UConn quarterback............”
Maybe the aid too a knee instead of standing for the National Anthem. Holding such a position as he had is no “game”, better he be GONE!
I was at a Trump Rally last year in Hershey & Trump led us in a LOCK HER UP chant.
Still plenty of Obama holdovers and career (Democrat) civil servants involved in the clearance adjudication process, and they’re playing politics, hard and fast. The same people who looked the other way when Ben Rhodes was denied even an interim clearance are rejecting Trump appointees over anything they can find.
Here’s an example of the politicization that has occurred since the earliest days of Trump’s administration. When Mike Flynn was trying to build his team as National Security Adviser, he hired a career intel civilian (from the Pentagon) and a retired Marine Corps two-star as top deputies. Both men had held TS/SCI clearances for years, with no issues. Should have been a simple matter of transferring their files to the SSO that serves the White House and “reading them into” any additional special access programs that might be required.
But almost as soon as their appointments were announced, both individual had their clearances suspended for unspecified reasons. And they remained in limbo until they asked their names be removed from consideration. At that point, they got their clearances back.
Trump made major mistakes by (a) not firing as many Obama appointees as possible on Day One, and (b) not having a full roster of replacements ready at the same time.
Personnel IS policy.
Could have been caught leaking as well
Can you lose your clearance for a DUI or financial problems?
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