Trump Revokes Security Clearances Of Named Political Adversaries, Identifying Public Criticism Of President As Newly Discovered National Security Risk

WASHINGTON. President Trump signed a memorandum Friday revoking the security clearances of more than a dozen named individuals, resolving a long-standing administration concern that Americans who had publicly criticized the President retained theoretical access to classified information.

The order, titled "Rescinding Security Clearances and Access to Classified Information from Specified Individuals," directs the heads of every federal department and agency to strip any clearance held by the listed persons and to bar them from secure federal facilities. The list includes former President Joseph Biden, former Vice President Kamala Harris, former Secretary of State Antony Blinken, former national security adviser Jake Sullivan, former Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, first-impeachment witnesses Fiona Hill and Alexander Vindman, New York Attorney General Letitia James, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, and 2016 opponent Hillary Clinton.

Administration officials emphasized that the action was a routine matter of national security and bore no relationship to the fact that every individual named had at some point investigated, prosecuted, testified against, or declined to support the President. The memorandum states only that it is "no longer in the national interest" for the listed persons to access classified material, a determination the document reaches in a single sentence and declines to explain.

Several of those named had not held an active clearance in years, and others had never held one, rendering the order a revocation of access many of its targets did not possess. A source within the administration described the distinction as unimportant. "The President wanted these people on a list," the source said. "Whether being on the list does anything is a separate matter, and not one anyone here has been asked to look into."

The memorandum joins a widening effort to convert the ordinary machinery of government into an instrument for addressing the President's grievances, arriving alongside executive orders stripping disfavored law firms of federal access and the dismissal of career prosecutors who had worked on cases involving him. Legal scholars noted that a security clearance has historically been revoked for specific infractions, such as mishandling classified material, rather than for the infraction of having displeased the sitting President, while conceding that the new standard had the advantage of being considerably easier to apply.

At press time, the President had asked aides whether the same memorandum could be used to revoke the clearances of people who had not yet criticized him but, in his assessment, eventually would.