or are they deliberately slow walking all these clearances as part of the “resistance”.
I think you are on to something. There was a report on FR recently also saying that and IIRC indicating that some on the inside had said as much.
Good point. There’s a third possibility here, one that I didn’t consider.
That is what I think. The FBI and/or whatever agency is supposed to be providing the clearances is taking its sweet time. Also, I suspect that they are tracking down every incident back to someone pushing another child on the playground in kindergarten, whereas for the 0bama administration, there was a great deal of looking the other way and pieces missing from files.
Still plenty of Obama holdovers and career (Democrat) civil servants involved in the clearance adjudication process, and they’re playing politics, hard and fast. The same people who looked the other way when Ben Rhodes was denied even an interim clearance are rejecting Trump appointees over anything they can find.
Here’s an example of the politicization that has occurred since the earliest days of Trump’s administration. When Mike Flynn was trying to build his team as National Security Adviser, he hired a career intel civilian (from the Pentagon) and a retired Marine Corps two-star as top deputies. Both men had held TS/SCI clearances for years, with no issues. Should have been a simple matter of transferring their files to the SSO that serves the White House and “reading them into” any additional special access programs that might be required.
But almost as soon as their appointments were announced, both individual had their clearances suspended for unspecified reasons. And they remained in limbo until they asked their names be removed from consideration. At that point, they got their clearances back.
Trump made major mistakes by (a) not firing as many Obama appointees as possible on Day One, and (b) not having a full roster of replacements ready at the same time.
Personnel IS policy.