I started this a couple of weeks ago when the Trump administration granted his son-in-law Jared Kushner his permanent security clearance.  It’s easy enough to feel suspicious because he’s openly untrustworthy.  No sane security model would trust Kushner with more than a burnt match.  He almost defines “skeevy.”  The guy has a disturbing inclination to lie under oath, then lie about that, then lie again.  He has undisclosed meetings with representatives of allies and adversaries.  He conflates the national interest with his personal business needs, and actively solicits bribes from foreign nations.  All of this is on the record.  He’s not just suspicious; he’s untrustable.

I don’t know how most people look at security clearances, but in Washington, it’s essential for some fields.  Suppose your job requires you to get and hold a specific security clearance.   If you can’t get one or lose the clearance you have, you’re not just out of a single job; you’re unemployable in that entire field.  Nobody will hire you after that.  I don’t agree with the way it works, but, right or wrong, that’s how it works.

For any ordinary federal employee, it’s disturbingly easy to get your clearance yanked.  The authorities emphasize to security clearance holders — early and often — that lying or omitting things is very bad.  They’re giving you access to extremely sensitive information, information that can be worth a lot of money.  The biggest, baddest problem with that would be if someone else had something they could use against you as leverage.

That leverage can include almost any big secret you keep from the feds, but meetings with representatives of foreign intelligence services would be a big ‘no.’  Big, overwhelming debts would be another disqualifying issue, especially if you forgot to disclose them. Obligations to dubious foreign sources are like icing on that bitter cake.  Beyond that, lying under oath is always a great way to get your employment in the security fields abruptly shortened.

Jared Kushner is in ruinous debt for his property at 666 5th Ave, NY.  It’s a debt Kushner guaranteed personally, which means there’s no shell corporation he can hide behind.  (And if that’s not an indication of bad judgment, I don’t know what is.)  He reportedly has a $1.2 balloon payment due in February 2019.  That less than a year away and Kushner isn’t making close to that much money.

It wasn’t going well for Kushner.  He solicited bridge loans from several American banks, all of whom concluded Kushner couldn’t begin to pay the money back.  We know that, during his role as a White House advisor, Kushner openly solicited loans from representatives of China, Russia, Abu Dhabi, and Qatar.  They also said ‘no,’ or at least didn’t say ‘yes.’  Kushner then may have used his position to retaliate against our Qatar allies.  I have no direct proof of that, but it’s odd that the US abruptly changed our official foreign policy position shortly afterward, supporting a Saudi blockade.  There was no good reason the U.S. suddenly took sides in a conflict we’ve avoided so far while betraying America’s security interests.  (Qatar isn’t just an ally; they host one of our biggest U.S. military bases in the region.)

It was no big surprise when Kushner received a $1.4 billion loan from Qatar for his albatross property.  Honestly, it looks either like pay-to-play or maybe just unadorned extortion.  Qatar gave the American President’s favorite son-in-law a fourteen-hundred-million-dollar loan that Kushner cannot by any stretch of economics repay from that miserable Manhattan building.

And the administration gave Kushner his permanent clearance with the highest level of access we grant.  That means we have to trust Kushner with the most valuable secrets the nation holds.  The purpose of security clearances as a process is to make sure that, before you give someone those keys, you’re as confident as you can be that they’ll defend the country above their self-interest.

Who here believes that “Country and duty first” describes any part of Jared Kushner?