The Clinton conundrum: Can Hillary get security clearance as president?

Jul 9, 2016, 10:39 PM

Former MyNorthwest Content Editor

Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton will not face criminal charges for her “careless” email controversy. It has now been speculated by some that if she becomes president, that controversy will prevent her from getting security clearance needed for the job.

That’s the issue KIRO Radio’s Dave Ross posed to legal analyst Rob McKenna recently. As a former Washington state attorney general, McKenna has had to go through a similar background check for security clearance.

“It’s more detailed than the word ‘background check’ suggests,” McKenna said. “How detailed it is relates to how high your security clearance is, and that is determined by how much you need to know.”

The process is handled by the FBI, McKenna noted.

The check looks into things like massive debt, in case a person could be vulnerable to blackmail. Or their friends, family and history — to ensure they are not a foreign spy planted in the country. Those factors don’t seem to be a problem for Clinton, Ross points out.

But McKenna thinks Clinton faces another problem entirely.

“You can lose security clearance as well for careless behavior,” he said. “When they are doing the background check, they are looking for evidence you are trustworthy”

“What’s interesting to me … is that there was an executive order signed by President Bill Clinton about the unauthorized disclosure of information, classified, that could cause damage to national security and loss of human life.”

That executive order signed by Clinton’s husband in the ’90s may come back to affect her.

“The order can operate to strip security clearances from both current and former government employees – former secretaries of state continuing to have high level security clearances so they can be available to consult with future secretaries and presidents,” McKenna said.

“(Clinton) could be, and arguably should be, stripped of her clearance as a result of the FBI’s findings,” McKenna said. “Although they said she didn’t commit a crime, they said she was ‘extremely careless.’ That would seem to me to be the standard for losing security clearance that President Clinton laid out in his executive order.”

BREAKING: I formally asked the Director of National Intelligence to deny Sec. Clinton access to classified info. pic.twitter.com/Kk8t00cdJn

— Paul Ryan (@SpeakerRyan) July 7, 2016