How did he slip through the security net and into the White House? The FBI refuses to comment. But former FBI agents and intelligence analysts with experience in vetting presidential appointments tell Newsweek the explanation is at once very simple and complicated—because the Flynn case was linked to the shadow world of Russian spies and Team Trump’s Moscow contacts.The simple parts: “When the Bureau does an background investigation, they don’t get transactional-level data on your financial,” says Aaron Arnold, an FBI counterintelligence analyst from 2008 to 2013. "In fact, the only financial data they collect when doing the background investigation is basically a credit check.” That is, a person can be “cleared” for top-secret documents in less time than it takes an ordinary person to get a mortgage, he and other specialists say. “With your Social Security number, they check the banks and so forth,” says Joe Navarro, a retired special agent who conducted so-called Special Presidential Investigations, or SPINs, of Cabinet appointees during the Reagan administration.“The biggest thing, I have to tell you, that we look for is not the financial stuff, but it's in the interviews that we do from the people that the person has put down as relatives or acquaintances or recommendations,” Navarro says. “We usually only check what the person has put down.” Since Flynn never “put down” his payments from foreign income, the DIA informed the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee on April 7, FBI vetters would not have seen them.
With the FBI facing a crush of Cabinet and White House appointments after an election, not only are its resources stretched thin but most of the checking is carried out by agents with little to no national security background or training, the bureau veterans say. Even if Flynn had declared large foreign payments into his own or his company’s bank accounts—he was paid over $500,000 by a Washington, D.C., lobbyist for Turkey—their “national security significance could be missed” because the records checkers “are on a special squad at Tysons Corner and all they do is background investigations,” says former senior FBI special agent David Gomez, who spent nearly 30 years conducting, supervising, managing and auditing SPINs in the field and at headquarters. In the post-election rush, the FBI vetting teams also wouldn’t have been trying to look into what Flynn omitted when he filled out Section 20 of his SF-86, the federal government’s national security questionnaire, Gomez and other FBI veterans say. “No one from the FBI is going around making sure that every ex-government executive is properly registering their activities,” says Arnold, who specialized in complex financial investigations into nuclear weapons smuggling. “The system is somewhat based on self-reporting.”
“In any case,” says Gomez, now a senior fellow at George Washington University’s Center for Cyber & Homeland Security, “presidential appointments are different in that the bureau will only report facts and leave the vetting decision to the White House staff.“You can see the problem there,” he added. Indeed, the Justice Department warned the White House about Flynn’s Russia problems in January, but it stayed mum and he continued in his job until he was fired in February amid the burgeoning scandal. The White House is still stonewalling the House Oversight Committee on what it knows about Flynn, the panel’s top Democrat, Maryland congressman Elijah Cummings, complained Thursday.
he's probably a kook anyways