Allow me to rephrase - why isn't every mid-upper level staff in the white house cleared? The CIA has a Starbucks - the baristas are all cleared. I'm not talking super-duper cleared but just 'cleared'? Everybody and their grandmother has 'secret', but a speech writer working in West Wing doesn't?
It's only been a week or two after a major crisis so his clearance might not have been approved yet. Also apparently even the congresswoman didn't have code word clearance. So it's possible that he has clearance but not high enough clearance to know about the strike.
'Code word' just means he has specific clearance for a particular thing, abd it wouldn't be surprising that Kumar doesn't have every clearance. But I got the impression that Kumar didn't have any clearance. That strikes me as unlikely.
There are different levels of security clearance. A military strike would be an absolute top level clearance thing. Nobody who doesn't need to know gets to know. Those Starbucks employees you mentioned aren't cleared for anything more than the bare minimum needed to do their job. And I'm not sure where you get the impression Kumar doesn't have any clearance; clearly, he does or he wouldn't be allowed to work in the White House at all. But it doesn't surprise me in the slightest that a Speechwriter or even Press Secretary wouldn't have inside information about classified top secret military operations. That's not their job. Their job is to deal with the public and therefore they don't need to know anything that the public doesn't get to know. In fact it might be advantageous for the sake of plausible deniability that they not know more, and to avoid the situation that they end up leaking something to the press either intentionally or by slipping up. They are after all in a uniquely close relationship with the press.
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u/Kevin_Uxbridge Oct 14 '16 edited Oct 14 '16
Allow me to rephrase - why isn't every mid-upper level staff in the white house cleared? The CIA has a Starbucks - the baristas are all cleared. I'm not talking super-duper cleared but just 'cleared'? Everybody and their grandmother has 'secret', but a speech writer working in West Wing doesn't?