Revoking security clearances for access to classified information in order to punish critics, as the White House proposed to do yesterday, is probably within the President’s authority. But it shouldn’t be. And there is, in principle, a way to prevent it.
“Not only is the President looking to take away [former CIA director John] Brennan’s security clearance, he’s also looking into the clearances of Comey, Clapper, Hayden, Rice, and McCabe,” said White House press secretary Sarah Sanders. “The President is exploring the mechanisms to remove security clearance because they’ve politicized and, in some cases, monetized their public service and security clearances.” (Comey and McCabe, it turns out, no longer hold security clearances.)
“Making baseless accusations of improper contact with Russia or being influenced by Russia against the President is extremely inappropriate,” she said. “And the fact that people with security clearances are making these baseless charges provides inappropriate legitimacy to accusations with zero evidence.”
In fact, making baseless accusations (let alone well-founded accusations) is not normally grounds for denial or revocation of a security clearance.
But in the wake of a 1988 Supreme Court case known as Navy v. Egan, it is often presumed that the President can grant, deny or revoke a security clearance for any reason or for no reason at all.
Yet that is not exactly correct, as Louis Fisher explained in a 2009 paper for the Law Library of Congress.
While the Court in Egan affirmed deference to the executive branch in matters of national security, even there such deference was not absolute and it was explicitly constrained by the possibility of legislative action (“unless Congress specifically has provided otherwise”).
“Nothing in Egan recognizes a plenary or exclusive power on the part of the President over classified information,” Fisher concluded. See Judicial Interpretations of Egan by Louis Fisher, The Law Library of Congress, November 13, 2009.
It follows that if Congress disapproved of the use of the security clearance system to regulate or suppress critical commentary, then it — or perhaps a new Congress — could effectively prohibit such use.
Recognizing the power of the national transportation infrastructure expert community and its distributed expertise, ARPA-I took a different route that would instead bring the full collective brainpower to bear around appropriately ambitious ideas.
NIH needs to seriously invest in both the infrastructure and funding to undertake rigorous nutrition clinical trials, so that we can rapidly improve food and make progress on obesity.
Confronting this crisis requires decision-makers to understand the lived realities of wildfire risk and resilience, and to work together across party lines. Safewoods helps make both possible.
Yesterday, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency proposed revoking its 2009 “endangerment finding” that greenhouse gases pose a substantial threat to the public. The Federation of American Scientists stands in strong opposition.