Mitch Perry
A group of House Democrats is asking the FBI to review whether first daughter and White House Adviser Ivanka Trump omitted information from her security clearance application when she joined the administration as an unpaid White House adviser.
Broward/Palm Beach Representative Alcee Hastings is among the 22 signers of a letter to acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe.
Democrats want McCabe to investigate whether Ivanka Trump was truthful in her filling out an FS-86 application for a top-level security clearance. The document requires applicants disclose foreign contacts, meetings, and business interests by the clearance holder in addition to those of their spouse and siblings.
The issue refers to Ivanka’s husband, Jared Kushner, who had been making continuous revisions to his own FS-86, omitting key meetings with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyack; Sergey Gorkov, head of state-run Vnesheconombank and most recently, Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, who met with Kushner and Donald Trump Jr. in June 2006.
“We are concerned that Ivanka Trump may have engaged in similar deception,” the letter states. “The high standard to which we hold public servants, particularly senior advisers to the President of the United States, requires that these questions be raised, and promptly answered.”
Hastings is not the only Florida Democrat to try to block a Trump family member’s security clearance. Last week Debbie Wasserman Schultz introduced two amendments into a spending bill that would have revoked the security clearance of Kushner, a White House adviser and the president’s son-in-law.
One of the amendments to the Commerce, Justice and Science Appropriations bill would bar funds from being used “to issue, renew, or maintain a security clearance for any individual in a position in the Executive Office of the President who is under a criminal investigation by a Federal law enforcement agency for aiding a foreign government.”
The amendment failed by a 30-22 vote.
A second amendment sought to revoke the security clearance of White House staffers who deliberately fail to disclose meetings with foreign nationals or governments on their questionnaire for national security positions. It also failed on a 30-22 vote.
