Who clears the President?

[hudebnik]

My late stepfather worked for the CIA for many years. Not sweeping the floors, not sitting in an office reading magazine articles and writing reports about their national-security implications (as I would have been doing if I'd gotten that internship), but "real" spy-craft, running spies in foreign countries. He had retired before my mother met him, so his career had little effect on my life, but he brought a very different and well-informed perspective to discussions of global affairs.

One day, in a discussion of security clearances, I asked "Who clears the President?", to which he replied "The President is cleared by the voters on the second Tuesday in November." Then went on to explain that, in practice, if there were a Presidential candidate who couldn't be trusted with classified information or was actually compromised, the intelligence community would find a way to get that fact out to voters, and such a candidate wouldn't get elected.

My stepfather, fortunately, didn't live to see that last sentence proven false.

Comments

[metahacker]

The president can declassify anything, IIRC. But then it's declassified, which isn't what happened here.

[hudebnik]

Right. Normally, if we need to share something really sensitive with an ally, I think the intelligence community proposes sharing it, the President authorizes it, and the intelligence people contact their opposite numbers in the allied country. And if that really sensitive material came from another ally, they check with that other ally before even bringing it to the President. (I don't actually know this, having never worked in the intelligence community.) None of that happened here: the President decided entirely on his own, without advice or consultation, that Russia was enough of an ally to share material that wasn't his to share.

But then, this President has never been one to seek advice or consultation with anybody else: one of his consistent leitmotifs in the months since the election has been "the decision is mine alone," whether about Cabinet nominations, attacking Syria, firing Comey, etc. (That's sorta the theme of "The Apprentice" too.) And nothing enrages him so much as the suggestion of limitations on his power. "Why bother vetting my Cabinet appointees for conflicts of interest? I've decided whom I want, and that makes them Cabinet officials. How dare a mere judge think (s)he can nullify my executive order? I decreed it, so it's going to happen." In short, "you're not the boss of me! Nobody tells me what I can and can't do!"

[watersword]

You really would think that an eighteen-month campaign with opposition research and the force of muckraking journalism would do the job, AND YET.