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It is being reported in the media that the Trump transition team is skipping the FBI background check for nominees. Instead, they are using private investigative organizations. Naturally, there is a lot of tut-tutting among our political betters.
The concern is that the officials (e.g. FBI Director Christopher Wray) overseeing the background checks are the very ones that Trump has promised to fire. It would be tempting for them to interfere or to use the information developed against the nominees. In addition, FBI background checks are notoriously slow, so it delays the point when confirmation hearings can start and lengthens the time that the Deep States can do its Trump-proofing. It shows how broken the confirmation process is when you have to outsource the background checks.
As an aside, I once participated in a background check for one of my Chinese ESL students who had joined the Army and needed a Top Secret clearance. The student listed me a reference, and an investigator came to my house. The final question was whether I would give my former student a Top Secret clearance if it were my decision and why. I said, "No, because he has family in China who could be pressured." The investigator told me that was not a valid reason and that I had to give an answer based only on my personal knowledge of the student. So I finally said "Yes," but I thought that was the craziest way to make a security clearance decision.
Discussion (22)
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The fact that he has relatives in China is baked into the cake, already. He had to divulge close family in the application. If you had said he once expressed concern about his family being in China, that might have been a different discussion. Since Clinton, China has not usually been dealt with as a hostile power, and I have worked with Chinese natives in the federal environment on multiple occasions. I am not personally endorsing the policy.
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That's an interesting perspective on the clearance process. It can be jiggered to produce a desired outcome by controlling the informal context of the formal question.
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Things have changed then, because one of my office mates waited for months for his clearance, and it was denied because he still had family (grandparents) in the PRC. He needed the clearance to do the work he had been hired for, so he wasn't there much longer.
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That distinction makes sense, and I hadn't thought of it that way. My concern was based on a general knowledge of how a Confucian society works instead of anything specific that he had said.
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I have to say , I am just loving Trump 2.0 . He is approaching taking power in DC just like you would approach a wild dangerous animal . With cunning ;) .
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