While presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner has had notorious difficulties obtaining permanent White House security clearance during his tenure in the West Wing, little attention has been paid to whether President Donald Trump himself would pass the muster if he were an appointee and not the president.
The Washington Post reached out to a former official who has worked on the White House security clearance adjudication process for both Republican and Democratic presidents who believes that it's very likely Trump would be denied security clearance if he weren't president -- in part because his past payoffs to mistresses would create a significant blackmail risk.
In particular, the official points to security clearance guidelines that warn against granting clearance to people who have engaged in the kinds of behavior Trump allegedly engaged in with adult film star Stormy Daniels.
One guideline, for instance, states that "conditions that could raise a security concern and may be disqualifying include... sexual behavior that causes an individual to be vulnerable to coercion, exploitation, or duress." And another guideline states that people may be disqualified from getting security clearance due to "deliberate omission, concealment, or falsification of relevant facts from any personnel security questionnaire," which means that Trump could have been denied clearance had he lied about his Daniels payoffs before getting security clearance.
Joseph Lewis, a former assistant director at the FBI, similarly said that Trump's payoffs to women would raise red flags for FBI officials, although he also said that it's rare that extramarital affairs are used to blackmail government officials.
"A significant problem, of course, is that you don’t know what is being paid for in this case," he said. "If you get into paying hush money, there are consequences — or at least some indication that there might be something that you don’t want exposed, and therefore something that had to be looked into."
