‘Disgraced’: Secret Service stops renewal of former director’s security clearance

The Secret Service was moving forward with renewing former Director Kimberly Cheatle’s top-level security clearance but reversed course after RealClearPolitics inquired about a key senator’s opposition, according to multiple sources in the Secret Service community.

Sen. Ron Johnson, a Wisconsin Republican who chairs the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations and previously chaired the full Homeland Security panel, argued that Cheatle should not have her security clearance renewed after her leadership decisions contributed to the agency’s numerous failures surrounding the assassination attempt against Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania.

“Following the security debacle in Butler, the former director of USSS made the right decision to resign,” Johnson told RCP. “I see no reason for her security clearance to be reinstated.”

Asked for comment on Johnson’s opposition, the Secret Service issued a vague statement saying Secret Service Director Sean Curran, a Trump appointee, had decided that “not all former directors” should have their security clearances renewed.

The U.S. Secret Service, along with several top U.S. intelligence agencies including the CIA and FBI, has regularly updated the security clearances for all former directors. Although this practice is a matter of public debate, a Secret Service spokesman told RCP the purpose of the renewals “was so the agency can maintain formal and protected communication, including potentially sensitive and classified matters with former officials.”

“Since appointed, Director Curran has been building a dynamic team of knowledgeable advisors that will help implement his vision for the agency,” the spokesman said. “Additionally, Director Curran has been modernizing the intelligence apparatus within the agency. During that process, he has determined that not all former directors need to have their clearances renewed.”

Sen. Marsha Blackburn, a Tennessee Republican who serves on the Senate Judiciary Committee which conducted a joint investigation with the Homeland Security panel into the failures at Butler, maintains that Cheatle’s failure should prevent her from ever receiving a security clearance again.

“Kim Cheatle disgraced the Secret Service by failing to prevent a horrifying attempt on President Trump’s life,” Blackburn said in a statement to RCP. “Not only did she oversee one of the greatest security failures in our nation’s history, but she also stonewalled congressional oversight and ran away from my colleagues and me when we confronted her. Under no circumstances should she be allowed to regain her security clearance, and it is shameful she would even try.”

In the days after the assassination attempt that nearly took Trump’s life, killed Corey Comperatore, and wounded two other rally attendees, Cheatle, who was hand-selected by former first lady Jill Biden, was the focus of congressional and public furor over what she conceded was “the most significant operational failure of the Secret Service in decades.”

At the GOP presidential convention just days after the assassination attempt, a group of Republican senators, including Blackburn, confronted Cheatle and demanded more information about the agency’s failures. When the director declined to answer in the packed convention hall, the senators chased her and peppered her with questions.

Cheatle subsequently resigned following widespread criticism over her testimony to the House Oversight Committee, in which she refused to answer several lawmakers’ questions and prompted ridicule with her claim that no law enforcement officer was positioned on the roof where the shooter fired the shots because of the safety risk presented by its slope. Before her resignation, Rep. Anna Paulina Luna called for Congress to level charges of inherent contempt and perjury against Cheatle. Cheatle, however, resigned, and calls to hold her accountable for her abysmal appearance before Congress quickly faded.

Cheatle made headlines again on the anniversary of the Butler rally when Sen. Rand Paul, who chairs the Homeland Security Committee, issued a blistering report accusing Cheatle of lying to Congress when she testified last year that she hadn’t denied Trump’s security detail the resources it requested. Speaking through her attorney Cheatle vigorously refuted Paul’s allegations, arguing that she had directed additional assets to be provided, “particularly in the form of agency counter-snipers.”

A General Accounting Office report, commissioned by Sen. Chuck Grassley and released on the weekend anniversary of the Butler assassination, found that top Secret Service officials received classified intelligence related to an Iranian threat against Trump’s life 10 days before the Butler rally but failed to relay the information to federal and local law enforcement personnel responsible for securing and staffing the event.

Multiple Secret Service sources last year also asserted that Cheatle and her leadership team had repeatedly denied Curran’s requests for more security assets for Trump throughout his campaign, apparently because they were following an outmoded protocol that treated him merely as a former president – and not the highly polarizing nominee-in-waiting – and, thus, not in need of the top-level security assets that are routinely assigned to help protect sitting presidents, vice presidents and even first ladies.

So far, neither Paul nor Rep. James Comer, who chairs the House Oversight Committee, has pushed the idea of a criminal referral, but Comer is not ruling anything out.

“If stark evidence of an intentional effort to deceive arises, or the Secret Service under new Director Sean Curran informs us that Ms. Cheatle was not just wrong or confused but undertook a purposeful effort to mislead in her testimony, this Committee will respond,” an Oversight Committee aide told RCP.

“Whether or not Ms. Cheatle’s testimony meets the legal definition of misleading Congress, it’s clear she failed in her mission leading the agency and appropriately resigned,” the aide added. “Testifying witnesses always have a legal obligation to tell the truth.”

Curran’s decision to halt the Secret Service practice of renewing security clearances of some former directors follows Trump’s decision to revoke access to classified information for dozens of intelligence officials who served during the Biden and Obama administrations, and even some who served in his first term.

(The issue of not renewing a clearance is different than revoking one. Rank-and-file Secret Service agents, as well as intelligence and military officers and officials, hold clearances for five years until they are renewed or unless they are suspended and revoked. They can use these clearances to land national security jobs in the private sector, but their new employers then must seek to renew the clearances once they expire.)

Less than 24 hours after returning to office, Trump ordered the revocations of security clearances for dozens of former intelligence officials who were either involved in an elaborate scheme accusing him of colluding with Russia to win the 2016 election or had sided with Biden in the 2020 election. He issued an executive order specifically revoking clearances for the group of 51 former intelligence officials who signed a public statement in 2020 arguing that the emergence of Hunter Biden’s laptop bore “all the classic earmarks of Russian disinformation.” Those signing the letter include former CIA Directors John Brennan and Michael Hayden, former National Intelligence Director James Clapper, former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, and Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton, who wrote a tell-all memoir following his time in office.

In March, Trump also signed an executive order suspending security clearances for employees of the law firm Perkins Coie, a powerhouse Democratic law firm that represented Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election and played a key role in commissioning the Steele dossier, the largely discredited political opposition research report at the heart of the Russiagate controversy. Perkins Coie filed suit, and a federal judge granted a permanent injunction barring the Trump administration from enforcing the executive order. Justice Department lawyers appealed the decision in early July.

Several former national security officials have argued that the practical effect of Trump’s revocations was minimal to them.

Norm Eisen, a former special counsel to the House Judiciary, which oversaw Trump’s 2019 impeachment, reacted to the cancellation of his clearance in January by arguing it would only encourage him to file more lawsuits against Trump.

“It’s like the third time he’s announced he’s revoking my security clearance. I mean, does he revoke it, then give it back to me so he can revoke it again?” Eisen, who served as an ambassador to the Czech Republic under Obama and now works as a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, asked on X.com. “Who does he think I am, a big law firm or a billionaire who’s gonna back down? It just makes me file even more lawsuits!”

During his first term, Trump considered revoking the security clearances of Brennan, Clapper, and several other top intelligence officials, whom he argued at the time were part of a cabal to politicize intelligence and undermine his presidency.

Trump ultimately held back and allowed the group to retain their clearances until his reelection. But the focus on former intelligence officials’ security clearance renewals and Trump’s subsequent revocations has drawn heightened scrutiny of the practice.

Throughout the last several decades, top former intelligence agency officials have continued to retain access to classified material as a courtesy and as a way to allow the former officials to consult and collaborate with their successors. As Washington has grown hyper-partisan in recent years, that cooperation has broken down or ceased to exist altogether, spurring criticism that former top security officials were using this rarefied access to land lucrative positions at Fortune 500 companies or talking-head positions at cable networks without providing any benefit to national security.

Sean Bigley, a national security law professor at Chapman University who previously specialized in litigating security clearance cases, made the case in a 2018 Wall Street Journal op-ed that “preferential treatment for former officials doesn’t improve national security” but instead “creates a caste-system.”

Bigley noted that a 1988 Supreme Court decision, Department of the Navy v. Egan, established that a president, in his role as commander in chief, has “absolute power to grant, deny, or revoke access to classified information.”

A body of law and policy has since established that a “security clearance should be granted or continued only if it is clearly consistent with the interests of national security.” Such authorization of access to classified information also must be joined with a demonstrated “need to know,” Bigley argued.

At some indiscernible point in modern political history, a special carve-out of the “need to know” principle developed for those at the very top of the U.S. intelligence community. President Obama formalized the practice with a 2009 executive order but limited access to documents the officials had reviewed, signed, or received during their government service.

Bigley has argued that the limiting instruction had been all but ignored, and a select few intelligence officials were continuing to receive finished intelligence products and briefings from their agencies long after parting ways, with “no discernible benefit to taxpayers.”

“You have all of these former government bureaucrats, who are continuing to have access to the highest level of classified information, and then they can go and take that continued insider access and make themselves a hot commodity in the private sector or on the cable news circuit,” Bigley told RCP in an interview. “That’s not what security clearances are supposed to be used for – it’s a fringe benefit that should be pulled.”