CNN
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An unnamed woman was denied a top-secret security clearance this year due to being a “close” relative of an authoritarian dictator of an unnamed country, according to a publicly available document from the Defense Department’s Office of Hearings and Appeals.
The administrative judge in the case ultimately decided to deny the clearance in what appears to be an extraordinary case because the applicant is related to “an extremely bad and dangerous person, a dictator of a country that is hostile to the United States.”
More than 1.2 million people had top-secret security clearance as of October 2017, CNN previously reported.
The applicant, who is not named, is in her 30s and married to an American citizen born in the US, and has worked for defense contractors for several years, the document says. She and her family moved to the US in the 1990s when she was young and became US citizens; they are not in contact with any of their family still living in the country in question — referred to only as “Country X” in the document.
The judge said that Country X “supports international terrorism, and it conducts cyberattacks and espionage against the United States.”
“Applicant was born a citizen of Country X,” the record says. “A close family member (cousin, aunt, uncle, niece, or nephew) is the dictator of Country X. Applicant’s parents and their children, including Applicant, immigrated to the United States in the 1990s when she was young. They all became U.S. citizens.”
The family all changed their names upon getting to the US, though the applicant told the court her mother “still fears retaliation.”
The document say that the woman in question already has a secret security clearance and no concerns have been raised over her handling of sensitive information.
“This is a difficult case because Applicant is intelligent, honest, loyal to the United States, a model employee, and a current clearance holder with no evidence of any security problems,” the administrative judge on the case, Edward Loughran, wrote in the document. “She credibly testified that her connections to Country X and its dictator could not be used to coerce or intimidate her into revealing classified information.”
“There is nothing about her that makes her anything less than a perfect candidate for a security clearance except her family connections to a dictator, Loughran said.
Administrative decisions on security clearance eligibility are regularly posted publicly by the Defense Office of Hearings and Appeals.
Dr. Marek Posard, a military sociologist at the RAND Corporation, told CNN the information in the records suggested the person in question could be from North Korea.
“It sounds like this is Kim Jong Un’s cousin,” Posard said. “The thing is, they mention a dictator and state terrorism. Only four countries are on the state terrorism list — two are involved in cyber, and one is particularly retaliatory, which is the DPRK (North Korea).”
Currently, the four countries listed by the US as sponsors of state terrorism are Cuba, North Korea, Iran, and Syria.
The Washington post reported in 2016 that North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un’s aunt and her three children immigrated to the US in 1998. The judge…
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