Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) said Friday he intends to present an amendment to “block” President Trump from “arbitrarily revoking security clearances.”
The Senate Intelligence Committee’s highest-ranking Democrat tweeted his announcement Friday afternoon in response to the Trump administration’s decision to revoke former CIA Director John Brennan’s security clearance:
I will be introducing an amendment next week to block the President from punishing and intimidating his critics by arbitrarily revoking security clearances. Stay tuned.
— Mark Warner (@MarkWarner) August 17, 2018
Warner’s plans to add his proposal to the Senate’s defense appropriations bill, which also has provisions to fund the Department of Labor and the Department of Health and Human Services, Fox News reported.
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders announced on Trump’s behalf Wednesday that the administration would revoke Brennan’s security clearance, saying he “has a history that calls in to question his objectivity and credibility.”
Sanders, reading Trump’s statement aloud at the Wednesday White House press briefing, added that Brennan also “leveraged” his access to classified information to make outlandish claims about the president.
“Mr. Brennan has recently leveraged his status as a former high ranking official with access to highly sensitive information to make a series of unfounded and outrageous allegations, wild outbursts on the internet and television about this administration,” the statement read, in part.
Brennan, who served as CIA director under the Obama administration, has been a vocal critic of the Trump administration and had recently encouraged Republican lawmakers to impeach Trump after his July 16 press conference in Helsinki with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The administration is also looking to revoke the security clearances of several other former and current officials, with Trump announcing Friday he plans to revoke the clearance for Department of Justice official Bruce Ohr.
Warner called the Trump administration’s decision to revoke the security clearances of these officials an “effort to silence critics.”
“This is clearly another effort to silence critics and not allow the Mueller investigation and for that matter the Senate Intelligence Committee investigation to get to the bottom of this,” the Virginia Democrat said.
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