The House Oversight Committee on Tuesday voted along party lines to subpoena a former White House staffer over the Trump administration’s policies regarding security clearances.
The panel, led by Chairman Elijah Cummings, D-Md., decided 22-15 to compel Carl Kline, the former White House personnel security director, to testify before Congress after a whistleblower told lawmakers over the weekend that more than two dozen rejected security clearance applications for Trump aides were later approved, despite red flags.
Cummings told the committee earlier Tuesday that the subpoena was necessary because Kline, who is now stationed at the Defense Department, had ignored three previous requests to appear before investigators, only agreeing to provide narrow voluntary testimony this week after the whistleblower’s interview was made public.
“He will come in voluntarily, but he will not answer any of our questions about specific officials, about specific security violations, or about specific security clearance adjudications. Instead, he will only talk about general policies,” Cummings said. “This is clearly not sufficient.”
Tricia Newbold, a career White House security office employee who has served under presidents from both parties over the past two decades, told House Oversight members on Saturday that she and her colleagues could count 25 security clearance denials since 2018 that were eventually overturned. Newbold, who still works for the administration, sat down with the panel as part of its investigation into clearances obtained by senior Trump advisers, including President Trump’s daughter Ivanka Trump and her husband Jared Kushner.
[Read more: Sarah Sanders says Democrats’ probe of clearances endangers 3 million who have them]
House Republicans on the committee condemned their Democratic counterparts on Tuesday for their management of the inquiry, triggered by reports in February that Trump ordered former White House chief of staff John Kelly to grant Kushner a permanent, top-secret clearance.
“First a Saturday deposition, then yesterday a press release after talking to just one witness where you handpick a few parts of her testimony, and now today. Now today we’re going to subpoena a guy who just sent us a letter saying he’s willing to come here voluntarily,” said ranking member Jim Jordan, R-Ohio.
The panel also voted on Tuesday to authorize subpoenas for Attorney General William Barr and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross in relation to all 2017 documents about the inclusion of a citizenship question in the 2020 Census.
All four subpoenas the committee approved have already been issued.
