‘That’s When You Hang Up And Call The FBI’: Asha Rangappa On Trump Jr.

As we’ve noted on a couple of different occasions this year, former FBI counterintelligence agent and current Associate Dean at Yale, Asha Rangappa is pretty damn smart.

And as we’ve also been keen to mention, her resume is better than yours (and ours). So generally speaking, it’s worth listening to what she has to say.

Incidentally, Asha is also a great follow on Twitter and generally a super fun person.

https://twitter.com/AshaRangappa_/status/884392327145553920

"this is pitiful… treason used to mean something. they used to pull the traitor out and they used to jail him"…https://t.co/LMqFre8Q7Y

— Heisenberg Report (@heisenbergrpt) July 10, 2017

On Tuesday evening she had this to say on CNN about the “people running our government”:

https://twitter.com/AshaRangappa_/status/885359069112012801

Good point, no?

Now without further ado, here’s her latest Op-Ed…

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Via Asha Rangappa for WaPo

Like all new FBI agents at Quantico, I got to know one particular individual very well when I was in the academy there. Her name was Carla F. Bad. Strictly speaking, she was not actually a person, but an acronym, whose name was a mnemonic device for all the ways the bureau taught agents to measure people seeking positions of public trust: character, associates, reputation, loyalty, ability, finances, bias, alcohol and drugs. Carla F. Bad is the touchstone against which FBI agents learn to assess a person’s honesty, integrity and trustworthiness in the course of checking their background. And she – rather than the criminal code – might be precisely what best reveals the shortcomings of the Trump administration.

The revelation that Donald Trump Jr. met with a Russian lawyer to obtain incriminating information about Hillary Clinton has sparked another round of analysis on the technicalities of criminal law. Specifically, legal experts are focused on whether White House adviser and President Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, who also attended the meeting, violated the law by failing to disclose this meeting on his SF-86 government background form. But focusing on bright-line rules of criminality misses the point. The deeper question is whether members of Trump’s administration can uphold the trust that has been placed in them as stewards of the government they have been chosen to lead. On this front, the criminal code shouldn’t be the only yardstick. Even if Trump’s aides and family have managed to toe the line of the law, the news out of the Russia investigation so far leaves little reason to have faith in their judgment.

For the record, the SF-86 isn’t easy to fill out. The form, more than 100 pages long, asks an individual seeking a national security position – meaning a position requiring a security clearance – for every place they’ve ever lived, every country they’ve ever visited, background information on every close relative, and almost every possible variation on their contacts with foreign officials. Even knowing that a false statement can carry a penalty of up to five years in prison, it’s not uncommon for even the most honest person filling out the form to inadvertently omit a piece of information. On my own SF-86, which I completed when I was 27 to become a special agent for the FBI, I failed to disclose a speeding ticket I got when traveling home from college for Thanksgiving when I was 19. I got a grilling from the FBI: Why, they wanted to know, did I not mention this? “I forgot” wasn’t the answer they wanted, but to my relief, they did accept it.

Which brings up the bigger picture: The SF-86 isn’t an end in itself, or an attempt to entrap someone in a falsehood. It’s a starting point for the FBI to determine the kind of person you are – and whether you are someone who can be trusted to guard sensitive information, uphold the law and protect the United States. And that’s where Carla F. Bad comes in. It is most often questions that arise on these grounds, not false statements on the application itself, that prevent hundreds of individuals every year from obtaining their dream job in the federal government. In fiscal 2015, the last year for which data was available, the government approved 638,679 clearances, but at some agencies, such as the CIA, as many as 8.5 percent of applications were denied. The government reported that “foreign influence” was the most common reason for delaying security clearances, followed by “financial considerations.”

Measuring the actions of Kushner, members of Trump’s campaign and even the president himself against Carla F. Bad is revealing. Consider the questions that an FBI agent would ask a reference while conducting a background check: Can this person be trusted to do the right thing in a difficult situation? Is this person known as a reliable and honest person in their community? Does this person associate with individuals of questionable integrity? Has this person ever demonstrated a bias against a particular group of people? Does this person spend money wisely, or are they in serious debt? Has this person done or said anything to make you question their allegiance to the United States and its institutions? Answering “yes” to any of these questions would not make the person in question a criminal. But it would raise serious red flags about their suitability to hold a position of public trust.

Lawyers for Trump administration officials insist that their clients didn’t break any laws at the meeting with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya last June. But merely following the law is the least we expect of anyone in our society. It should, of course, be the bare minimum of what we expect from our public servants. Carla F. Bad reminds us, though, that as a nation we have held our government officials to something far higher: to common decency, fairness, ethical behavior and moral character. The recent focus on finding a smoking gun of criminality, or defending against it, has blinded us to these qualities. As a result, any behavior that lurks in the gaps of the criminal code gets defended as acceptable.

The question to ask isn’t whether Kushner or others broke the law in meeting with Veselnitskaya. It’s not even whether Trump’s campaign aides broke any laws by “colluding” with a foreign power last year. If they did, then they should be held to account – but this is a ceiling, not a floor. To make this the standard of their suitability to lead the country suggests that Congress’s failure to imagine and criminalize every possible lapse of ethical conduct is the last word on the expectations of our government officials. The question should be, more simply, whether the pattern of behavior that has so far come to light by various members of the administration demonstrates a capacity or willingness to uphold the public’s trust.

On this point, we can’t count on the results of the special counsel to provide the answer. As a former director of the FBI, Robert Mueller is familiar with the spirit of Carla F. Bad, and her principles will no doubt animate the special counsel investigations underway under his charge. In the end, however, Mueller’s inquiry will be limited to actions that crossed the threshold of criminality, which is a very narrow question.

It remains to be seen whether any actions by Trump Jr., Kushner, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, former adviser Carter Page, former national security adviser Michael Flynn or anyone else connected to the White House meet the very high standard for criminal liability. But while the criminal investigations take their course, the American public can reach their own verdict on the administration’s trustworthiness – and here, Carla F. Bad should be our guide.