the FBI’s employment eligibility guidelines say all employees must obtain a “Top Secret” clearance in order to work at the agency following a background check.

The furor here is about Dan Bongino, and Nicole Rucker, Kash Patel's assitant

The article goes on to say that FBI employees at the level Bongino and Rucker are working at have "SCI" clearance on top of Top Secret. Back in the 1990s, it was exceptionally difficult to get TS clearance. SCI on top of that must have been even harder.

I guess this is no worse than Jared Kushner getting a waiver to work at the White House during Trump's first term, but holy cow, getting this kind of special treatment really does reinforce a big difference between classes, doesn't it? Any ordinary, non-rich person getting "alerts" on polygraphs would probably be immediately dropped from getting a Top Secret.

> Back in the 1990s, it was exceptionally difficult to get TS clearance. SCI on top of that must have been even harder.

I think you are exaggerating this as the other poster points out. Every US military cryptolinguist gets a TS-SCI clearance. So, while every student at Defense Language Institute was doing his/her language course, a background check was done, and the rejection rate in the 1990s was presumably tiny. And ditto for other military intelligence roles. A certain amount of military personnel getting the clearance were semi-native speakers of a language in demand who still had foreign ties (family or land owned in the old country) but they passed nonetheless, which must speak to a certain laxness.

Is Kash Patel's assistant rich? What does rich have to do with anything, that came out of nowhere. A more likely scenario is that these are political appointees and presumably an elected official wants to be able to get their guy in there no matter what

SCI is not above TS. It is a parallel system to restrict information within controlled silos. You can have SCI access with secret only.

> getting this kind of special treatment really does reinforce a big difference between classes

The Trump admin has always been an example of ignoring the elite political class and bringing in whoever he likes. Kash Patel himself came from a family of asylum seekers who fled India and he got his start as a public defender. Not exactly old money.

The guy he brought on as an assistant (without a polygraph) got his start as a beat cop from NYPD before joining the Secret Service.

There are literally hundreds of thousands of TS/SCI cleared government employees and contractors. There is nothing "exceptionally difficult" about any of this.

I think this is a misunderstanding a lot of people have about clearance.

The different clearance levels are not really an indication of different levels of vetting being done to a person. If you can get cleared for Secret, there's no particular reason you couldn't get cleared for TS. It's the same SF-86 form, the same investigation (well, not that I know, exactly. All I know is that it didn't look any different from my perspective), the same interview. There are some differences in how often you'll get re-interviewed, I think. It's not really anything so onerous that you have to ever think about it, really.

The different levels are much more about need to know, which is driven by potential impact of breach. You don't even have to go through the lower levels before you get to the higher ones. The selectiveness of giving people higher clearance levels is more about controlling exposure surface area.

On top of that, clearance level is kind of more about what meetings you'll be allowed in, what conversations you'll be allowed to participate in. SCI is more having ongoing access to data. Then there are additionally "caveats", which are clearances to specific programs. Each of these things are a different axis in the clearance system, not different levels of a linear system.

Contrary to somewhat popular belief, a polygraph is not required to obtain TS/SCI. You can do a polygraph and that's a whole additional designation, "TS/SCI with Poly," as you might see in various job ads.

The fact that these people can't pass TS is extremely telling and extremely concerning. Not being able to pass basically means the investigation revealed information that the person has a reasonable chance of being coerced into providing information. A simple example: maybe you have a mistress you're trying to hide; a foreign intelligence service could try to blackmail you into providing them information. Maybe you have a lot of debt, especially gambling debt; you'd be judged particularly susceptible to taking bribes, which would also set you up to be easily blackmailed.

But I know at least one guy who is a raging pothead who has had high level clearance for the last 20 years. They didn't care because he was open about it. If he was open about it with them, then it was clear it wasn't an issue he could be coerced over. I know people who had past criminal charges on their records. They were fine, too, for the same reason. It used to be you couldn't hold a clearance if you were gay, but nowadays, people are much more open and accepting of it such that it's not a reasonable attack vector for coercion.

Basically, it means you've got major skeletons in your closet and probably tried to lie about them if you can't pass for S or TS. If you can't pass for TS then you probably shouldn't have a position of public trust at all, even for just handling CUI.

> Back in the 1990s, it was exceptionally difficult to get TS clearance. SCI on top of that must have been even harder.

Not really. I know a litany of people who had TS/SCI clearances in the 90s. It was literally a job requirement for entire divisions of the US govt.