Aaron Blake: The White House’s hypocritical, slippery slope on purging its critics’ security clearances

Now we know why President Donald Trump complained about former intelligence officials being paid as cable analysts. On Monday, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Trump was looking into whether to revoke the security clearances of some of his chief intel and law enforcement critics for, among other things, “politicizing” and “monetizing” their past positions.

Here’s who Sanders listed:

Former CIA director John Brennan,

Former FBI director James Comey

Former director of national intelligence James Clapper

Former CIA and NSA director Michael Hayden

Former White House national security adviser Susan Rice

Former FBI director Andrew McCabe

The potential move appears mostly symbolic. Brennan and Hayden quickly noted that they don’t use their clearance anymore. And McCabe has actually already lost his clearance, given he was fired by Attorney General Jeff Sessions. The fact that he was included on the list above suggests this wasn’t exactly a well-researched trial balloon – if it even was researched.

But even beyond that, the White House’s effort and justifications are a fantastic mix of problematic and hypocritical.

Here’s how Sanders explained it: “The president is exploring the mechanisms to remove security clearance because they politicized and, in some cases, monetized their public service and security clearances. Making baseless accusations of improper contact with Russia or being influenced by Russia against the president is extremely inappropriate, and the fact that people with security clearances are making these baseless charges provides inappropriate legitimacy to accusations with zero evidence.”

The first part of this that’s rather rich is the idea that it’s unacceptable to “monetize” political office and experience. Trump as president hasn’t gone very far to separate himself from his businesses, and he has made a habit of promoting and using his properties, with both foreign leaders and political types frequenting them. As for using positions of power for personal gain, there were more than a dozen investigations into now-former Environmental Protection Agency administrator Scott Pruitt for exactly that kind of thing before he was pushed out. Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke faces similar probing.

The second part that’s rather thick is the idea that making “baseless charges” is now disqualifying. Trump has lodged many conspiracy theories from the comfort of the White House, most notably that the Obama White House wiretapped his campaign, that it spied on his campaign, that voter fraud made him lose the popular vote, that a Pakistani-born Democratic IT aide was part of some kind of conspiracy, etc. If making charges with no evidence is now the standard, Trump should be the first person excused from future briefings.

But the slipperiest slope of all is the idea that these officials are “politicizing” their positions. This is a word that gets thrown around a lot – almost always in bad faith. It’s often how you try to censor someone for saying something you don’t like. Definitionally, it’s suggesting that they are saying things they don’t believe because they don’t like Trump, but that’s a completely subjective judgment.

And if this is the standard, you could use it to justify freezing out pretty much anyone who blows a whistle or disagrees with you politically. It could very quickly become a tool for creating a monolith inside intelligence circles in which nobody with any stature is allowed to disagree. It could also have a chilling effect on any such official who might speak out in the future.

Trump really doesn’t have a leg to stand on here. For months during the 2016 campaign, Michael Flynn was one of his lead surrogates, even leading a chant of “lock her up” during the Republican National Convention. If it was wrong to be political while having a security clearance, Trump sure didn’t seem to speak up about Flynn. In fact, he even hired Flynn despite knowing that Flynn was under investigation for secretly working for a paid lobbyist to Turkey.

But that’s also the point. Trump isn’t concerned about people making political statements; he’s worried about them making the wrong ones. Most of the people on this list actually aren’t partisans. They present problems precisely because they’re mostly not, and yet they’re still taking the highly unusual steps of speaking out. So the White House must make them into political actors. That’s what Monday’s spectacle was about.