By Evan Perez, Zachary Cohen and Katie Bo Lillis, CNN

(CNN) — President Donald Trump is granting temporary, six-month security clearances to incoming White House officials who have not completed the vetting process typically required before being allowed to access highly-classified information, blaming a backlog of background checks that he helped cause.

It’s a move national security lawyers inside and outside the government say is unusual, if not unprecedented.

One former US official who worked on clearance issues in the Biden and first Trump administrations raised concerns that foreign intelligence partners, on which the US relies for much of its intelligence work, will curtail what they share with the US, out of fear that their sources may be put in danger.

“They will start restricting their intelligence,” the official said. “If someone on the other end here has not been vetted, why would they share that?”

Trump made the move in one of the dozens of executive orders issued on his first day in office, immediately giving high-level clearances called TS/SCI to incoming officials, including some who have never been vetted for potential security vulnerabilities.

“It’s such a dangerous thing,” the former official said. “To forego that process is stupid.”

The FBI, which conducts the background investigations of officials and appointees usually required for security clearances, is working to clear a backlog of hundreds of applications. Part of the reason for that is Trump’s transition waited about a month after the November election to sign the agreements required for the FBI to begin its work, people briefed on the matter said.

But Trump complained about the backlog and blamed bureaucracy in the executive action he signed.

“There is a backlog created by the Biden Administration in the processing of security clearances of individuals hired to work in the Executive Office of the President,” Trump’s executive memorandum said, referring to an office that employs hundreds of people.

“Because of this backlog and the bureaucratic process and broken security clearance process, individuals who have not timely received the appropriate clearances are ineligible for access to the White House complex, infrastructure, and technology and are therefore unable to perform the duties for which they were hired.”

Trump has long complained about the security clearance process, and during his first term, he ordered clearances for more than two dozen people, including his own son-in-law Jared Kushner and his daughter Ivanka, who had struggled to complete the security clearance process, according to congressional testimony.

Several incoming Trump officials submitted for vetting have never had access to classified information before and, as such, typically would not be granted an interim clearance without at least a review of a government form documenting personal information and some other basic information, according to a source familiar with the process.

Others have had some vetting but never undergone a polygraph test, which is a stringent requirement for access to the US intelligence community’s classified network, the sources added.

But Trump’s executive action will allow those officials to effectively bypass those requirements, at least in the short term.

In the weeks after Election Day, Trump’s team resisted participating in the formal transition process, which includes signing memorandums of understanding and secrecy agreements typically considered a prerequisite for accessing classified material before the new administration assumes office.

Instead, Trump’s transition team focused on conducting its own internal vetting of candidates for top administration jobs.

The Trump team’s resistance when it came to pre-vetting individuals for national security positions was consistent with how he handled the transition process after the 2016 election. Trump maintains a deep mistrust of the national security establishment, including US intelligence agencies and the FBI, which he believes actively worked to subvert his first term as part of the so-called “deep state.”

The delay this time around contributed to a backlog in the vetting process as key officials had still not been cleared on the day Trump took office.

The FBI’s effort to clear the backlog has prompted the bureau to temporarily reassign dozens of agents around the country to help conduct the background investigations. Some officials have pushed agents to try to complete their work in as quickly as 24 hours, according to current and former officials briefed on the matter.

Officials worked through the weekend leading up to inauguration to process the interim clearances.

The-CNN-Wire
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