Lindsay Maizland

Published on Vox.com when I interned with their Foreign team in Summer 2017. All interviews scheduled and conducted by me. 

Democrats in Congress are once again calling for Jared Kushner’s top-secret security clearance to be revoked in the wake of revelations that Kushner attended a meeting with a Russian lawyer promising dirt on Hillary Clinton during the presidential campaign — a meeting he initially failed to disclose on his security clearance application.

They argue that the president’s son-in-law and top adviser, who has been identified as a “person of interest” in the FBI investigation into Trump’s Russia ties, shouldn’t have access to classified information, especially if he intentionally left off his foreign contacts when he applied for his clearance.

That’s in part because security clearances are meant to be a judgment of a person’s “character and trustworthiness,” a Congressional Research Service report on the clearance process explains.

But while the 4.2 million Americans who’ve done work for the federal government or a government contractor have experienced the byzantine and often tedious process of obtaining a security clearance, most Americans are probably unfamiliar with how it all works.

So here are some clear answers to the top questions about what a security clearance means, how a person goes about getting one, how and when they can be revoked, and — crucially — what revoking Kushner’s security clearance would actually mean for his ability to access classified information.

What is a security clearance?

A security clearance determines whether an individual is eligible to access classified national security information. That’s any information that, if disclosed, could potentially damage US national defense or foreign relations. Any federal employee or contractor must be granted a security clearance before working with classified information.

There are three levels of security clearances corresponding to sensitivity of information the individual needs to access for their job: confidential, secret, and top secret. Most White House jobs require top-secret clearance.

“For someone relatively senior in the White House, they’re going to have access to the classified information if the president says it’s required,” Evan Lesser, the founder and president of ClearanceJobs.com, a website providing information about security clearances and defense jobs, told me in an interview.

Having a security clearance doesn’t mean you automatically get access to all the information classified at that level, though. Classified information is typically shared on a “need to know” basis — which means that a lot of sensitive intelligence is off limits unless someone specifically decides you need to be read in on it.

Read more.