President Donald Trump is to revoke former President Joe Biden’s security clearances, saying he is doing so because Biden had rescinded his four years ago, in response to what Biden called Trump’s “erratic behaviour” around the January 6th Capitol riot.
Trump made no effort to disguise his reasoning. He did not accuse Biden of any security breaches. Instead, he wrote on social media that there was “no need” for Biden to continue having access to classified information, exactly parroting the justification Biden offered in 2021 for denying briefings to Trump.
“Joe, you’re fired. Make America Great Again!” Trump wrote in his signature all-caps.
As a practical matter, the decision will have little import. Former presidents get episodic briefings partly as a courtesy, and partly because, in times of a more bipartisan spirit, sitting presidents sometimes call former occupants of the office for advice, or to ask about their experience in handling a delicate diplomatic negotiation.
But there seems to be no chance of Trump ever calling his predecessor. Instead, the security clearance revocation serves primarily to add to a remarkable list of grievance-driven acts by Trump in his first 19 days in office.
The president has already withdrawn federal protection for five former members of his first administration. Those included some officials – former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, former Defense Secretary Mark Esper and John Bolton, the former national security adviser – whom a stream of intelligence suggests Iran has plotted to kill.
“I think it is just performative,” Beth Sanner, who gave Trump his highly classified presidential daily brief during his first term, said in an interview Friday night.
“The only reason a former president needs briefing is to prepare before they speak to foreign leaders, or because they have some other kind of engagement that relates to foreign policy,” Sanner said. “But there is no real reason to do it except before those moments, and in this case it’s hard to imagine Biden is really going to need it.”
In his social media posting, Trump cited an investigation by Robert Hur, a special counsel appointed to examine how a number of classified documents from Biden’s time as vice-president ended up in his garage. (Unlike Trump, Biden was not prosecuted over his handling of classified material.)
“The Hur report revealed by Biden suffers from ‘poor memory’ and, even in his ‘prime,’ could not be trusted with sensitive information,” Trump wrote, in the latter case misstating the report’s findings. “I will always protect our national security.”
The timing was curious: All week there have been questions about whether young employees of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency had appropriate security clearances to enter payment systems in the Treasury Department, or gain access to personnel records at the US Agency for International Development, which Trump and Elon Musk, acting on his behalf, were dismantling.
Trump was clearly riled by the memory, four years ago, of how Biden stripped him of his clearance.
“What value is giving him an intelligence briefing?” Biden said in an interview with Norah O’Donnell of CBS News at the time. “What impact does he have at all, other than the fact he might slip and say something?” – The New York Times
