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Donald Trump is to revoke former President Joe Biden’s security clearances, saying he is doing so because Biden had rescinded his four years ago, in response to what Biden called Trump’s “erratic behaviour” around the January 6th Capitol riot.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The president has already withdrawn federal protection for five former members of his first administration.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 billionaire 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?”
It comes as a federal judge early Saturday temporarily blocked a Trump administration panel led by Musk from accessing government systems used to process trillions of dollars in payments, citing a risk that sensitive and confidential information could be improperly disclosed.
US district judge Paul Engelmayer in Manhattan issued the order after a coalition of 19 mostly Democratic-led US states filed a lawsuit late Friday arguing Musk’s department of government efficiency (Doge) has no legal power to access the US department of treasury systems.
The lawsuit said Musk and his team could disrupt federal funding for health clinics, preschools, climate initiatives, and other programmes, and that Trump could use the information to further his political agenda.
Doge’s access to the system also “poses huge cybersecurity risks that put vast amounts of funding for the states and their residents in peril,” the state attorneys general said. They sought a temporary restraining order blocking Doge’s access.
The judge, an appointee of Democratic former president Barack Obama, said the states’ claims were “particularly strong” and warranted him acting on their request for emergency relief pending a further hearing before another judge on February 14th.
“That is both because of the risk that the new policy presents of the disclosure of sensitive and confidential information and the heightened risk that the systems in question will be more vulnerable than before to hacking,” Engelmayer wrote.
His order bars access from being granted to department of treasury payment and data systems by political appointees, special government employees and government employees detailed from an agency outside the department of treasury.
The White House and department of treasury did not immediately respond to a request for comment. – Agencies
