Jared Kushner Shouldn't Be Allowed to Play Government: LA Times

The Questionnaire for National Security Positions, a grueling 127-page confessional known as the SF-86, should terrify you.

It’s meant to, after all, and is a requirement of all government employees seeking permanent security clearances. Before you can be trusted with state secrets, you need to be put through the moral wringer — where failure could equal jail time — writes The Los Angeles Times.

“It’s a place to face your whole shifty lifetime of corner-cutting, half-truths, pleasure-seeking and brazen misdeeds. Slept with a married colleague, defaulted on a J. Crew card, didn’t quite finish an online college course? There’s no hiding anything on the fearsome SF-86,” wrote opinion columnist Virginia Heffernan.

It is, then, by default, astonishing that first son-in-law and senior advisor to the President, Jared Kushner, and his seemingly incalculable number of liaisons and connections with foreign nationals — and his lies about them — weren’t arrested on the spot. He was, instead, granted America’s highest security clearance.

And that’s on top of making an “eye-popping hundred-plus ‘mistakes’ on his SF-86, a lot of them about Russians,” according to Heffernan.

It’s not news that Kushner had many problems with his forms, or that he was granted several opportunities to right the wrongs on his SF-86. He left off, almost comically, that he had used a private email server for state business, and failed to list those many meetings with foreign officials.

“They slipped his mind,” wrote the columnist. “One hundred times.”

“I have never seen that level of mistakes,” director of the National Background Investigations Bureau, Charles Phalen, said of Kushner’s SF-86.

And still, he passed.

According to two NBC sources, this was made possible by an ex-Pentagon official named Carl Kline. Kline was hired by Trump to be the White House director of personnel security in May 2017 and in May 2018, Kushner was suddenly determined safe for permanent secret and top secret clearances.