Flashback: Media Didn’t Care When Obama Scrubbed Security Clearances

The establishment media did not care when the Obama administration called for the aggressive scrubbing of security clearances back in 2013.

According to our media today, revoking security clearances of those who are no longer in government is the stuff of banana republics, of dictators, and a full-blown assault against the First Amendment.

But when President Obama sought to do the exact same on a massive scale, the media hardly blinked and the news only earned dutiful coverage.

“W.H. Looks to Scrub Clearance List,” was the November 21, 2013, headline at the far-left Politico.

In a directive obtained by POLITICO, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper questioned the booming rolls of security-clearance holders. At last count, more than 4.9 million people held clearances, of whom over 1.4 million were cleared for access at the “Top Secret” level.

“I write to express my concern about threats to national security resulting from the increasing number of people with eligibility for access to classified national security information, particularly Top Secret (TS) and Top Secret/Secure Compartmented Information (TS/SCI),” [then Director of National Intelligence James] Clapper wrote in a three-page memo, dated Oct. 31 and cited at a Senate hearing Wednesday.

Clapper asked agencies to perform a top-to-bottom scrub of the teeming rolls of people authorized to access classified information and to remove anyone deemed not to have a so-called need to know.

What’s more, Clapper specified his concern about contractors: “Agencies should debrief all government and contractor personnel who no longer require such access and update the appropriate national security database or repository.”

Obviously, Clapper and the Obama administration singling out contractors would result in job and income losses for all those former G-Men.

So  where was the media uproar?

Here you have the Obama administration openly taking aggressive action for the exact same reasons the Trump administration is: a legitimate security concern over those no longer in government using their continued security access as a means to obtain wealth and position in the private sector (including anti-Trump media outlets).

But as you can see, when Obama did it no one in the media cared.

As you can see, back in 2013, no one in the media screamed, as our media repeatedly have throughput the last week,  that the revocation of these clearances would risk national security, much less be the stuff of a banana republic eager to kill free speech.

The difference, of course, is that during the Obama administration, the establishment media (meaning anti-Trump outlets like CNN, NBC News, the New York Times, and the Washington Post) had zero desire to uncover anything negative about Obama; and so, in turn, they had no desire to put former-government  officials on the payroll who would dish dirt on their precious Barry, or to use them as background sources.

Today, however, now that the media want to frame Trump as a Russian spy, hysterically dishonest partisans like former CIA director John Brennan (who just had his security clearances revoked), James Clapper, and Phil “The Screamer” Mudd are very useful to media, especially when the media can use the imprimatur of these in-the-know partisans to push fake news.

Better still, that same imprimatur allows the media to spread fake news by hiding behind anonymous “intelligence sources” who tell the media the fake news the media are so desperate to publish.

Not that we did not already know this, but the Politico piece from 2013 that no one cared about, once again proves the establishment media are not currently freaking over any kind of moral or professional principle. It is all about partisan politics, it is all about people in government cashing in access for money they could not earn otherwise, and especially those willing to do so in order to aid and abet the media’s ongoing coup against Trump.

https://www.breitbart.com/big-journalism/2018/08/20/flashback-media-didnt-care-when-obama-scrubbed-security-clearances/