WASHINGTON — (AP) — President Donald Trump says his administration will move to suspend the security clearances of the more than four dozen former intelligence officials who signed a 2020 letter saying that the Hunter Biden laptop saga bore the hallmarks of a "Russian information operation."
The action is an early indication of Trump's determination to exact retribution on perceived adversaries and is the latest point of tension between Trump and an intelligence community of which he has been openly disdainful. The sweeping move, announced via executive order Monday, also sets up a potential court challenge from ex-officials seeking to maintain access to sensitive government information.
“The president has a lot of authority when it comes to security clearances. The problem the White House will run into is, if they depart from their existing procedures, they could set up a judicial appeal for these 51 people — and it will probably be a class-action suit since they’re all in alike or similar circumstances,” said Dan Meyer, a Washington lawyer who specializes in the security clearance and background check process.
The executive order targets the clearances of 50 people in all, including the 49 surviving signatories. The list includes prominent officials like James Clapper, the former director of national intelligence under President Barack Obama and John Brennan, Obama's former CIA director. Also targeted is John Bolton, who was fired as Trump's national security adviser during his first term and later wrote a book whose publication the White House sought to block on grounds that it disclosed national security information.
It was not clear how many of the former officials still maintain security clearances.
Mark Zaid, a lawyer who represents eight people who signed the letter, said Trump's action served as a “public policy message to his right-wing base” even if the practical impact may not be significant for those who no longer have or need a clearance. He said he would sue the administration on behalf of any client who wanted to challenge the order.
“There’s nothing in this that shows me, regardless of presidential authority, that this action is not subject to existing law and policy that mandates procedural and substantive due process,” Zaid said.
At issue is an October 2020 letter signed by former intelligence officials who raised alarms about the provenance of emails reported by The New York Post to have come from a laptop that President Joe Biden's son, Hunter, had dropped off at a Wilmington, Delaware, computer repair shop. The newspaper said it had obtained a hard drive of the laptop from longtime Trump ally Rudy Giuliani, and the communications that it published related to Hunter Biden's business dealings in Ukraine.
The signatories of the letter wrote that they didn't know whether the emails were authentic or not but that their emergence has “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”
But Trump's director of national intelligence, John Ratcliffe — also his current pick to lead the CIA — contradicted that assessment by saying there was no intelligence to support the idea that Russia had anything to do with Hunter Biden's laptop. The FBI, which was conducting its own criminal investigations into the younger Biden, seemed to back up Ratcliffe's statement by telling Congress in a letter it had nothing to add to what he had said.
Hunter Biden was subsequently convicted of both tax and gun charges, but was pardoned last month by his father.
Though courts are historically reluctant to weigh in on disputes involving security clearances, the unilateral suspension by Trump is a departure from standard protocol in which individual executive branch agencies would be tasked with creating an investigation into a person's fitness for a clearance or whether it should be revoked.
Throughout his first presidency, Trump fumed about an intelligence community that he believed had been politicized against him, repeatedly citing the investigation into ties between Russia and his 2016 campaign. In August 2018, he announced that he had revoked the clearance of Brennan, who led the CIA at the time the Russia inquiry began and became a prominent critic of Trump.