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The White House faced fresh questions on Thursday over whether Donald Trump’s closest aide, Natalie Harp, had access to US government secrets without security clearance.
Harp, who is executive assistant to the US president, worked at the White House for a year without the routine clearance, the MS Now network reported on Thursday. She refused to file the relevant forms for unknown reasons, according to two unnamed sources cited by MS Now.
It was only when the White House counsel’s office raised the issue, and when Trump himself became involved, that Harp filled out the paperwork for a federal background investigation and was belatedly granted clearance, according to the report.
Norm Eisen, a former White House ethics tsar, said: “It is shocking that an aide who has potential exposure to the nation’s most sensitive secrets reportedly went without a security clearance for so long. Treating access to confidences as a casual job perk is an outrageous way to handle our national security.”
Eisen, co-founder of Democracy Defenders Action, a non-partisan group dedicated to free and fair elections, added: “This is the continued incompetence of an administration willing to set aside our country’s interests, ignore established protocol, and make the White House vulnerable to intelligence risks in order to appease Trump. The American people deserve answers.”
Harp’s influence has come under close scrutiny this week after her name was invoked by Jon Ossoff, a Democratic US senator for Georgia.
Harp has reportedly sent the US president adoring letters, helps him write social media posts, and has been dubbed “the human printer” because she supplies him with printouts of favourable coverage.
The MS Now report about her prolonged lack of security clearance drew criticism of the arrangement among former White House officials across the political spectrum.
In response, the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said in a statement: “Natalie Harp has a security clearance like everyone else, and she is a loyal and hardworking member of President Trump’s team.”
David Axelrod, who was chief strategist and senior adviser to Barack Obama, posted on X: “If this story is true, and the person closest to the @POTUS and his thinking on a daily basis has no security clearance and refuses to submit to the process of getting it, it’s a deadly serious issue.”
Richard Painter, a former chief ethics lawyer for George W Bush, noted that all White House staff usually undergo a background investigation, but only some require additional security clearance, depending on their access to classified information. “I’m not entirely clear what has been going on here with Natalie Harp,” he said. “My sense of most of what she’s doing has nothing to do with classified information.”
But Painter added: “If she is accompanying the president on his trips in Air Force One, in a proximity where she can overhear conversations that could include classified information, she needs to have the security clearance.
“You could be in a situation where, if the president wants her on his trips, and he’s in Air Force One, and he is on the phone, and she’s sitting in the cabin there because she’s doing something else, even if she doesn’t give advice on how to handle Iran and he’s on the phone talking about the next strike on Iran, right then and there she needs a security clearance.”
‘A disturbing trend’
The prospect of a potential security vetting lapse involving those closest to Trump carries echoes of Trump’s first term, Donald K Sherman, the president of the legal advocacy group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, said.
“In his first administration, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner was only granted a clearance after Trump ordered it, overruling concerns raised by intelligence officials,” Sherman said. “Too often, the president has given more flexibility with security clearances to those closest to him, which is a disturbing trend given the kind of sensitive information they may have access to, like national security information, contacts with world leaders, and other highly confidential information.”
Rick Wilson, a co-founder of the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump group, said: “It’s unsurprising that Donald Trump, who couldn’t pass a credit check, never mind a security check, would have no problem letting someone without clearance be in such a sensitive position for a year.
“This is after all, a guy who meets with Putin without any aides and praises Kim Jong-un. Natalie’s all-consuming fanatical devotion and willingness to be at Trump’s side whenever he needs plays into his pathological need for attention.”
Harp, 35, first came to national attention as a cancer survivor and enthusiastic Trump supporter who spoke at the 2020 Republican national convention in Washington. She joined the far-right One America News Network in 2020 and went to work for Trump two years later as he plotted his political resurrection.
She has frequently been at his side ever since. The CNN network reported that in 2023, when Trump was due to appear in court in New York, Harp discovered there was no seat for her in his motorcade so she jumped into the trunk of an SUV, insisting that he had personally asked her to attend.
And last month, when Trump secretly switched aircraft in Turkey after an alleged Iranian assassination threat, Harp was among a small group who accompanied him on a military aircraft while other officials and journalists remained onboard a decoy Air Force One.
This week Ossoff attacked Trump in a campaign speech, accusing him of being more interested in building his White House ballroom and travelling with “Natalie” than carrying out the duties of president.
The remark prompted an extraordinary backlash from the White House and sent social media into overdrive, with users speculating about the nature of Harp’s relationship with Trump.
Her loyalty to the president has also been documented in the book Regime Change, published this year by the New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan. They reported that Harp had written Trump intensely admiring letters, including one in which she told him: “You are all that matters to me.”
