National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard said Monday she has stripped security clearances from dozens of former national security officials, the Manhattan district attorney who secured a felony conviction against Donald Trump and a lawyer who represented a government whistleblower who triggered the first impeachment case against Trump.
The decision is the latest example of the Trump administration’s unprecedented use of security clearances to go after perceived political opponents.
Gabbard’s move, announced on X, followed up on an executive order Trump issued shortly after his inauguration to a second term as president in January, which called for security clearances to be revoked for 49 former national security officials. The ex-officials signed a letter more than four years ago suggesting Russia might have played a role in amplifying allegations about Biden’s son Hunter as part of a wider effort to influence the outcome of the 2020 election.
In his executive order, Trump accused the letter’s signers of “misleading and inappropriate political coordination” with Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign.
Trump’s order also called on the director of national intelligence to review the security clearances of others in and outside government who engaged in “inappropriate activity” related to the letter. The former senior officials have repeatedly denied Trump’s claim.
Gabbard said she had revoked security clearances and barred access to classified information for Antony Blinken, the secretary of state in the Biden administration; Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser; and Lisa Monaco, who oversaw prosecutions against Trump supporters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
In keeping with a previous vow by Trump, Gabbard said the daily intelligence briefing for the president would not be shared with Biden.
Traditionally, the presidential daily briefing has been shared with former presidents, but Biden suspended the practice for Trump.
Gabbard also canceled the security clearance for New York Attorney General Letitia James, who won a civil fraud judgment against Trump last year. In that case, a judge found that Trump defrauded banks by inflating his net worth in financial statements. Gabbard also revoked the security clearance of Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney who secured a conviction against Trump over a scheme to illegally influence the 2016 election through a hush money payment to an adult film actor who said the two had sex.
Under Gabbard’s action, Mark Zaid, a lawyer who has represented whistleblowers in the intelligence community for years, was stripped of his security clearance. Zaid represented an intelligence officer who filed a whistleblower complaint to Congress in 2019 over a phone call during Trump’s first term, in which he appeared to press Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to take actions to help Trump’s 2020 re-election campaign. The complaint prompted an impeachment inquiry in the House. Trump was formally impeached by the House and acquitted by the Senate.
Zaid said that under the law, he was entitled to due process over his security clearance.
“Not surprisingly, as I would expect in an authoritarian state, I have received none. It is patently obvious this action is nothing but petty retaliation because I represent my clients effectively in holding the Trump Administration accountable for its actions,” Zaid said in an email.
Zaid has had a security clearance for nearly 25 years, he said. During Trump’s first term, the Trump administration granted Zaid a higher-level top-secret clearance for a whistleblower case involving a Department of Homeland Security case, he said.
Kevin Carroll, who has represented intelligence officers suing the government, said the move against Zaid could force whistleblowers to look for other, riskier ways to call attention to their concerns.
“We shouldn’t want whistleblowers in the intelligence community going to Julian Assange,” Carroll said, referring to the founder of WikiLeaks. “We should want them going to security cleared lawyers such as Mark Zaid.”
A former national security official said the decision will hamper the Trump administration as it contends with an array of global threats, because it will be deprived of consulting with its predecessors who may have insights to share.
“It doesn’t impact the people who had clearances. It impacts the people in the government who might need to consult with them,” the former official said. “They won’t have the benefit of reaching out to former senior officials who have dealt with serious ongoing threats.”
Trump said last week he is scrapping clearances for attorneys at the prominent Washington law firm of Covington & Burling, who assisted former special counsel Jack Smith. The former special counsel led prosecutions against Trump over his handling of classified documents and his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
After Trump won re-election last year, both cases were dismissed. The Justice Department’s policy bars prosecuting a sitting president.
In his Feb. 25 memo, Trump also directed the attorney general and federal agencies to terminate any engagement with the law firm “by any agency to the maximum extent permitted by law.”
