Jared Kushner has lost access to his top-secret intelligence clearance along with several other White House aides who had been working on interim clearances, according to three sources who spoke with Politico.
Kushner, an adviser and son-in-law to President Donald Trump, will no longer have access to some of the nation’s most sensitive material to which he had access to for over a year while waiting for his background investigation to be finalized.
The move comes almost a week after The Washington Post reported that a top Justice Department official alerted the White House in early February of ongoing issued related to Kushner’s security clearance.
Trump could grant Kushner a high-level security clearance, but the president said last Friday he would leave the decision to White House Chief of Staff John Kelly.
Fox News reported Kushners clearance was downgraded from "Interim Top Secret" to "Interim Secret."
Kushner, who has been operating under an interim security clearance for about a year, had his access to the highly classified briefing cut off in the past few weeks, two sources told Reuters.
A third official, also speaking on condition of anonymity, said Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein recently passed new information to White House Counsel Don McGahn that led to the slowing or stopping of Kushner's pending clearance application. The nature of that information was not clear.
It also is unclear if and when Kushner's access to the PDB, which requires not only a Top Secret clearance, but also access to even more closely guarded intelligence, would be reinstated.
A White House spokesman for Kushner did not immediately return a phone call and email seeking comment.
Kushner's attorney, Abbe Lowell, said in a statement: "Mr. Kushner has done more than what is expected of him in this process."
"My inquiries ... have confirmed that there are a dozen or more people at Mr. Kushner's level whose process is delayed, that it is not uncommon for this process to take this long in a new administration, that the current backlogs are being addressed, and no concerns were raised about Mr. Kushner's application," Lowell said.
The President's Daily Brief is distributed to a small number of top-level U.S. officials. It includes highly classified intelligence analysis, information about CIA covert operations and reports from the most sensitive U.S. sources or those shared by allied intelligence agencies.
Trump's White House has been grappling with the security clearance issue since it emerged this month that staff secretary Rob Porter worked for Trump for a year with a temporary clearance despite accusations by his two former wives of domestic abuse. Porter has maintained his innocence.
Reuters contributed to this story.