Just Security Podcast: Sam Vinograd on Kushner’s Security Clearance Downgrade

Earlier this week, Jared Kushner was stripped of his interim top-secret security clearance, limiting his ability to view highly classified intelligence and potentially jeopardizing his role as a foreign affairs adviser to the President. The downgrade is reportedly related, in part, to Kushner’s failures to disclose meetings with foreign nationals, which raised flags about Kushner’s vulnerability to foreign intelligence blackmail. On this episode of the podcast, former Bush Treasury Department and Obama National Security Council official Sam Vinograd and I discuss blackmail and other inherent risks of “freelancing” in national security, as Kushner appeared to be doing.

(Music: Autumn Leaves by Podington Bear. Image: Drew Angerer/Getty Images)