WASHINGTON − President Donald Trump signed an executive order Monday revoking the security clearances of 50 former intelligence officials, most of whom Republicans have accused of coordinating with Joe Biden’s 2020 White House campaign to discredit reporting on Hunter Biden’s emails in the closing weeks of the 2020 presidential campaign.
All but one of the former intelligence officials signed a 2020 letter that said the public release of emails that reportedly belonged to Hunter Biden had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” Trump also revoked the clearance of his former national security adviser, John Bolton, who became a vocal critic of the Republican president after he left the administration.
The letter signers Trump targeted include former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, an intelligence official who worked for Republican and Democratic administrations; former CIA Director Michael Hayden, who led the department under former President George W. Bush; his successor in Barack Obama’s administration, Leon Panetta; and John Brennan, who held the role for much of Obama’s second term.
Several former Trump administration officials who also signed the letter about Hunter Biden were also stripped of their security clearances in the new president’s executive order.
In the letter, the former intelligence officials said they did not know if emails that were on a computer hard drive and purportedly described the Ukrainian and Chinese business activities of Hunter Biden were genuine or whether there was any Russian involvement in their release. But they said their expertise made them “deeply suspicious” that Moscow was behind the leak and attempting to influence the election. The content of the hard drive was provided to the New York Post by then-Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani and published by the tabloid newspaper.
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Trump accused the signatories of coordinating with the Biden campaign to discredit the Post’s reporting in the closing weeks of the 2020 presidential campaign, according to the Executive Order released late Monday by the new Trump White House. “Signatories of the letter falsely suggested that the news story was part of a Russian disinformation campaign.”
In the order, Trump also claimed the signatories “willfully weaponized the gravitas of the Intelligence Community to manipulate the political process and undermine our democratic institutions.”
“Federal policymakers must be able to rely on analysis conducted by the Intelligence Community and be confident that it is accurate, crafted with professionalism, and free from politically motivated engineering to affect political outcomes in the United States,” Trump also said.
Many of the signatories have said their efforts were not politically motivated, and that they signed the letter to warn the public of what they believed was another of Russia’s many efforts to intervene in U.S. elections and political discourse.
Two of the signatories have died, the directive said. But it also includes Bolton, the from Trump national security adviser who has become a staunch critic of the former and current president since leaving his first administration in 2019.
Trump said he was revoking any security clearance that Bolton might have because he “published a memoir for monetary gain after he was terminated from his White House position (that) was rife with sensitive information drawn from his time in government.”
“That’s the president’s prerogative,” Clapper, one of the chief signatories of the letter, told USA TODAY about the security clearance revocations. But, he added, “I don’t have a clearance.”
Many other signatories likely do retain their security clearances, often because of national security work they continue to do as contractors working on government matters.
Trump already revoked Brennan’s security clearance, in August 2018, according to a statement at the time from then-White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
Several of the signatories on the list declined to comment publicly.
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But one former senior intelligence official referred to a post on social media platform X by his lawyer Mark Zaid, an attorney who also represents others who signed the letter.
“It would be quite ironic that at same time Executive Order is issued to suspend security clearances of my clients…who did nothing but exercise 1st Amendment rights, White House claims it supports restoration of freedom of speech and seeks to end federal censorship,” Zaid said in his post.
The former senior intelligence official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said Trump’s decision to revoke the clearances could undermine U.S. national security by depriving key U.S. defense and intelligence contractors of the work being done on America’s behalf by these former leaders.
Much of the U.S. government’s intelligence gathering and analysis is aided by private contractors that hire these former intelligence officials after they leave government service. They rely on their security clearances to do their jobs, the former official said.
The former intelligence officials were hired for their current jobs because of their experience and talents and knowledge − and will now have to be replaced by somebody else who may not have the requisite talent or skills, potentially undermining U.S. national security, the former official said.
Pictures and text messages from the laptop were later used to convict Hunter Biden of gun charges. Before leaving office, Biden pardoned his son of federal gun and tax convictions and any other offenses he may have committed.
