'Danger' Fears as Trump Hands Out Top-Secret Clearances Without Background Checks

Per an outlet, senators on the Intelligence Committee claimed they have not seen the list of names nor how many people will receive the security clearances.
Shortly after his swearing-in ceremony on Monday, January 20, Trump issued a memo allowing his staff to send the list of people "immediately granted interim Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information (TS/SCI) security clearances," citing their ability to start to get work done.

"While it's not the best way to do it, it is probably their only alternative in the first couple months," Intelligence Committee member and Republican Senator Mike Rounds explained to the publication.
However, others argue there is a more secure way of getting authorization through a legal provision to expedite temporary clearances with less-intensive background checks.

"It seems unnecessary given that interim clearances can go through the normal procedure and be done in just a few days," said the president of the Federal Clearance Assistance Service William Henderson.
"If you're the clearance authority and somebody gives you a name and says, 'Give this person a clearance,' you don't know if his brother is working for the Mossad. You don't know anything about it," Henderson continued.

While the overreach has some civil servants worried, others aren't as concerned. "I believe the president's going to do the right thing to keep our country safe," Republican Senator Rick Scott stated. "He's the president of the United States, this is what he got elected to do."
"I haven't looked at it, I think due diligence is pretty important," Republican Senator Thom Tillis said.

Democratic Senator Mark Kelly — who serves on the Intelligence Committee — thinks The Apprentice alum is using the time crunch as a loophole. "He must feel like those — I don't know who those specific are — but I guess he feels that they wouldn't qualify under the normal process for a security clearance," he alleged.

"We do this in an orderly way for a reason. We don't want certain individuals who we feel are risks of releasing classified information to our adversaries," Kelly added. "This is day one. Let the FBI do their job."
It seems like a repeat scenario as the same situation happened in 2017 when Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner was initially denied security clearance.

According to a former Trump official who served in the first administration, the clearance delay caused them to sit out of a Situation Room meeting on National Security. Former Vice President Mike Pence reportedly told the employee at the time, "You got to be in there. We got to run this government."  
"It does take them enormous amounts of time and I think that's what the president was looking at, because we had several people that needed that, that it just took way too long to get them clearances. They couldn't do their jobs right away," the anonymous worker claimed.

"Frankly, one of the challenges the incoming administration has right now is they were slow to engage with the FBI for background checks and that slowed down their process of being able to have people with the background checks necessary for a security clearance review," Max Stier, the president and CEO of the Partnership for Public Service, pointed out.
"It is a shortcut which could have potentially very negative consequences," he made clear.