Revenge? Accountability? A little bit of both?
Fifty-one former intel officials claimed in October 2020 that the New York Post’s report on Hunter Biden’s laptop likely came as a Russian intelligence operation. Their reputations, as well as their ongoing ties to the intel communities, lent a lot of credence to the efforts to suppress the story by other news agencies and social-media platforms.
The only problem was that the laptop was authentic — so authentic, in fact, that the FBI already had the data from it and had been investigating the crimes it documented. Two years later, the Department of Justice acknowledged its provenance, as did Hunter Biden in later court filings. The 51 ex-intel officials have never explained why they claimed otherwise or intervened in the political process just as voters went to the polls.
And now they won’t get the chance to work in the field, at least for the next four years:
President Donald Trump says his administration will move to revoke the security clearances of the more than four dozen former intelligence officials who signed a 2020 letter saying that the Hunter Biden laptop saga bore the hallmarks of a “Russian information operation.”
The action is an early indication of the president’s determination to exact retribution on perceived adversaries and is the latest point of tension between Trump and an intelligence community of which he has been openly disdainful. The sweeping move, announced via executive order Monday, also sets up a potential court challenge from ex-officials seeking to maintain access to sensitive government information.
Can Trump revoke these clearances? Technically speaking, yes. Clearances are mostly a plenary exercise in the executive branch, and no one is entitled to access classified material except the elected president himself.
That doesn’t mean the effort won’t go unchallenged, especially with livelihoods potentially i the balance:
“The president has a lot of authority when it comes to security clearances. The problem the White House will run into is, if they depart from their existing procedures, they could set up a judicial appeal for these 51 people — and it will probably be a class-action suit since they’re all in alike or similar circumstances,” said Dan Meyer, a Washington lawyer who specializes in the security clearance and background check process.
Our colleagues at Twitchy have a couple of good posts on this already, so be sure to check out what arguments are floating on social media now. Mark Zaid, a well-known attorney in intelligence disputes, now represents eight of the 51 signatories and makes clear that he plans to challenge these revocations, possibly in a class action. Zaid acknowledges that the president’s power is plenary, but that it still carries some due-process obligations:
[more to come]
