The astonishing insignificance of the Jared Kushner security clearance ruckus

You'd think Jared Kushner had been handcuffed and hauled off to jail for espionage, malfeasance, incompetence and assault. It's the biggest news of the day. It's the first thing in weeks that's gotten the media to stop carping about guns. It's. That. Big!

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And yet it's nothing at all. A whole bunch of White House staffers were given temporary security clearances at the top secret level when they first started their jobs, pending FBI reviews of their applications to make those clearances permanent. As time has gone by and those reviews have not been completed on a number of people - especially after the brouhaha surrounding Rob Porter - White House Chief of Staff John Kelly made an organizational decision that those who've had temporary status for the past 14 months will have to revert to the status that would befit a) what they've been cleared for; and b) what they actually need to do their jobs. A lot of people who work at the White House don't need to see the daily national security briefing that President Trump sees. They had temporary clearance for it, but they can do their jobs without it. So Kelly is cleaning up that incongruency, while allowing everyone who received the so-called "downgrade" to remain in their jobs and do what they were doing before. In other words, this has almost no day-to-day effect on anyone. But because one of the people affected is the president's son-in-law, and the media are obsessed with both personalities and status, you'd think Kushner had been frog-marched out of the White House and subject to 50 lashes:

Friday’s decision is the first change to the clearance process instituted in the wake of the Porter debacle that will directly affect Kushner, who serves as a senior adviser to Trump and until now has had access to the president’s daily brief, the most highly classified document that Trump sees. “He cannot see the PDB, not a chance,” said Bradley Moss, a lawyer who specializes in national security law and clearances. “He no longer has access to a range of intelligence information that ordinarily someone in his position and somebody with his responsibilities would normally be privy to in order to perform their functions.”

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Moss said Kushner and others will be debriefed by officials in the White House security office, an event scheduled to take place Thursday, according to a person with knowledge of the situation. “They’re going to give him a list, ‘Here’s what you’ve been debriefed from, you’ve been debriefed from this program and that compartment, you no longer have any access to it, and any breach of that would be a serious security violation and a possible criminal issue.’” Kelly took the rare step last week of issuing a public statement that Kushner would be able to continue his work in the White House unfettered. “As I told Jared days ago, I have full confidence in his ability to continue performing his duties in his foreign policy portfolio including overseeing our Israeli-Palestinian peace effort and serving as an integral part of our relationship with Mexico,” Kelly said in the statement. It was unclear whether Kushner would need access to top secret information to continue performing those duties — and whether Kelly was personally prepared to enact a policy that could be perceived as a jab at the president’s son-in-law. The decision to downgrade White House staffers still working on interim clearances, however, indicates that Kelly is prepared to impose the same sort of discipline on the White House clearance process that he has tried to impose on the West Wing staff more broadly.

The part I put in bold is the crux of this whole thing, except I might substitute the word "portrayed" for "perceived."

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The media who are wetting their pants over this know that it's not about Jared Kushner at all. There are a whole bunch of other people affected by this, and if it's about any one individual, it's about Rob Porter, not Jared Kushner. So why is every headline the deals with this matter focusing on Jared Kushner? You know perfectly well why. Because it advances the narrative that Kushner is only in the White House because of nepotism, and that he's some sort of national security risk who will probably run to the Russians with all the information he's seen in the president's daily briefings. That's a pretty rich narrative, by the way, coming from the same people who celebrate the leaking of classified information when it helps them to embarrass the president or otherwise serves their purposes. By the way, a security clearance at the "secret" level, which is where Kushner and the others now land, is still a lot higher than anything you or I will ever see. He's still operating at a very high level of trust within the administration - just not as high as the president and the national security people directly around him. This is an administrative adjustment to better reflect reality and the needs people have in doing their jobs. It's also an example of how President Trump is trusting John Kelly's judgment rather than intervening on behalf of his son-in-law. There's no story here. But it's an opportunity to humiliate Jared Kushner and cast aspersions on President Trump in the process, so today it's the biggest non-news in the world.

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