Hillary Clinton's staffers may not qualify for security clearances in the event she gets elected and brings them to the White House, according to a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, due to their involvement with Clinton's mishandling of classified information.
"It's a real question whether Jake Sullivan, Cheryl Mills, Huma Abedin, and some of Hillary Clinton's other senior State Department advisors could get a security clearance going through the traditional background checks based merely on what we know from the publicly released emails that they sent and received from Secretary Clinton on that server," Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., said in a Tuesday interview with Hugh Hewitt.
Sullivan and Abedin both served as deputy chiefs of staff to Clinton at the State Department, while Mills served as chief of staff. Both Abedin and Mills have had long relationships with Clinton, while Hewitt noted speculation that Sullivan could be brought on as Clinton's National Security Advisor.
Asked whether the president could override traditional security clearance requirements in the event staffers failed to qualify on their own, Cotton responded, "The president shouldn't do that even if the president can do that."
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Cotton also talked about the nature of "sensitive compartmented information facilities," or SCIFs, where those who hold security clearances view classified information. One of the issues with Clinton's private server system was that it was not held in one of these facilities. Cotton said it was conceivable Russia possessed everything on U.S. systems held outside of the facilities.
"The Intelligence Committee's entire space is a SCIF where you don't take cell phones, you don't take iPads, you don't even take Fitbits," Cotton said. "Michael Morell, the former Deputy Director of the CIA, has testified that he thinks that Russia and similar nation state adversaries have collected almost everything on unsecure servers."
"She truly is compromised going forward," Cotton added. "She cannot know for sure, nor can anyone know for sure, exactly what Russia or other adversaries may or may not have collected from that server, or any other unclassified server. And therefore what might be used against her or against some of her senior aides that would presumably follow her into the White House should she win this election. I think that's a very risky proposition for the American people and for our national security."