Blowing The Whistle On The White House

How Tricia Newbold found her voice and exposed a national security scandal

- Jeff Stein

WHEN DONALD TRUMP AND HIS advisers arrived at the White House for their first real day of work on January 21, 2017, they inherited over 1,800 civil service employees who have more-or-less permanent jobs in the sprawling executive office of the presidency. One of them was Tricia Newbold, who over the past 16 years had risen from an entry-level job answering phones to a manager of security clearances.

Under Trump’s three predecessors, things had gone smoothly. No senior official in memory had been denied a clearance or removed because of a security problem. Then she met her new boss, Carl Kline, a veteran Air Force security expert recruited to the White House by a Trump aide.

Newbold, who had long ignored partisan concerns or personal relationships in her adjudication of security clearances, had begun flagging serious security vulnerabilities unearthed in the FBI’s background investigations of more than two dozen Trump appointees, including the president’s daughter Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner. The red flags included “foreign influence, conflicts of interest, concerning personal conduct, financial problems, drug use, and criminal conduct,” she would later tell congressional investigators.