Is Someone Out to Get You?

Welcome back. This is Sean Bigley and Lindy Kyzer of ClearanceJobs.com, and we’re talking this segment about the ever present question that I used to get in law practice, Lindy, and that is somebody has it out for me, will this tank my clearance prospects? And I have to tell you, I spent 10 years representing clearance holders and applicants, and this was a question that I could set my clock to every week. I would get a question from somebody along these lines, and it always involved a scenario, sometimes a my friend scenario, and it was limitless, the facts that went along with those and everybody wanted to kind of tell their story and say, Hey, I’ve got this neighbor who has an ax to grind, or I’ve got a coworker who has it out for me or a boss or my personal favorite, an ex who’s crazy and is going to tank my clearance prospects.

And some of these things were entertaining, some of them were a little wild in a scary way. They all though had kind of the unifying theme that more often than not these were things that I think were really unnecessary worries. The reason I say that, and this is something we’ll dive into a little bit more I’m sure in a minute, but the reality is most clearance denials and revocations are not based on somebody having it out for you. They’re based on things that are more black and white and easily provable. There’s a paper trail as you well know, you didn’t pay your taxes for X number of years or you’re up to your eyeballs in delinquent debt or you have a history of DUIs or something like that. And it was really uncommon in my experience to get these cases where somebody would have a, he said she said or he said, he said, or whatever the case may be, where that was enough to tank the clearance prospects. Now, that’s not to say that it never happened. More often than not these things were taken with a grain of salt. So I’m curious to get your perspective on this. I know you get a lot of wild questions on clearance jobs from people who I’m sure have similar concerns. What comes to mind there?

Are you trying to say the security clearance applicants are paranoid? We get those. The funny is we talk about this process and Sean and I are always going to give you some of the examples of the extreme side of the equation because if folks are anxious or concerned about the process, those are the folks who end up reaching out to legal counsel or to a security clearance career site or emailing or posting something on a message board. And we do get a lot of those and I think that’s why folks, it’s because people don’t really understand what the process looks at, right? They’re thinking about that one time they did something crazy or that one person who they have to list on the form, maybe because they’re an employer, the employment one comes up often for us. People are so afraid to say that they have been fired, which I’m like, if we’ve all been there, not everybody has to like you.

Goodness gracious. You do not have to be likable to keep a security clearance. I know it. There’s just so many people that it’s just not about your likability. It’s not a popularity contest. So I think understanding two things are really key for applicants in this, and the first one is it is a whole person concept, which literally means a single individual or incident or issue can’t tank you. They want to look at the totality of who you are. So if they have that one reference, in my experience, you can correct me here if you’ve seen otherwise, if an investigator hears something negative from a reference, they’re going to fact check that. Does that back up with something somebody else said, or like you said, a paper trail of, yeah, you’ve had a pattern of getting laid off from employers or timecard fraud or lying on your taxes.

Or, you have an issue telling the truth. They are looking for those cross references. So that’s the first piece of it. And the second piece of it is I think people get really scared about if their background investigator will like them. I mean, some people do. Some people need to care more, and your background investigator could not care less. In my experience. Sometimes I wish they cared more, but they have a list of questions, they’re there to answer those. They are looking for a baseline of information and then they don’t have to make any value judgements on you. They send it to an adjudicator, so you don’t need to try to impress your investigator or the more you try to talk around an issue, seen the applicants do that, right? They’re afraid somebody’s going to say something, so I’m sure as an attorney this makes you super nervous, so they overshare way more information than they need to because they’re trying to get ahead of this other person who, again, nobody caress about you as much as you think they do. This other person may or may not even have anything to say, but I find people oversharing information to get ahead of something negative they think somebody is going to say, and that person is not going to get asked about that by an investigator and it’s probably not going to share it, and you’re worried about something that you don’t need to be.

You raised a lot of interesting points. First of all, many years ago, as you know, I was a background investigator prior to becoming an attorney, and your talking triggered something in my mind and that was, I remember distinctly on a number of occasions, somebody saying to me on the conclusion of the interview, Hey, I just wanted to let you know there’s this really crazy person and I don’t know what their deal is. If you happen to talk to them, there’s a screw loose upstairs and just pay them no mind. Almost like the Wizard of Oz, ignore the man behind the curtain. It was like, well, okay, I wouldn’t have thought about this or I wouldn’t have given it a thought, but now that you’re putting it out there and now that you’re drawing attention to it, now I’m curious what are they going to say? And so let’s go find them and go talk to them.

Yes, to your point, nine times out of 10 people who have an ax to grind, they obviously have an ax to grind, and it’s going to be taken with a grain of salt. It’s not going to be enough in a vacuum to tank a clearance. If a background investigator goes and interviews somebody and they just spout off about this person being the devil and the worst person on the planet, and there’s nothing to back it up and no other references that are corroborating it, no paper trail, that’s going to be written off most often. I will tell you where this most often came up for me was the case of the vindictive ex-spouse. Boy. I mean, I just used to get an earful from people about the crazy things that the ex-spouse used to do in the context of their marriage and, oh, did you know that on the weekends they’re secretly snorting cocaine and did you know that they have this and they do that?

And I mean it was just, you’d sit there most of the time and be like, okay, is there any proof? Is there anything anyone else that you can direct me to who would corroborate this? No, but you don’t believe me. Well, it’s not that I don’t believe you, but I mean I need some evidence. It’s that kind of stuff, and so if that’s all that it is, it’s not usually going to be enough. Now, the other extreme of that or the other kind of element there, as you say, people trying to impress their background, investigators, and I used to get that too, where people would list some celebrity b-lister that they tangentially knew as a reference to try to impress the investigator, and it was like, okay, this person doesn’t really even know who you are. This is not helping you. Or they would list the boss’s boss’s boss as their job reference, who doesn’t even know this person couldn’t pick ’em out of a lineup.

You’re not helping yourself here. Those were obviously the kind of silly ones, but there were occasionally cases that I would see in law practice and as an investigator that did actually create some problems for people or at least generate some additional investigation, and those were inevitably where you had a former spouse or romantic interest alleging some kind of domestic violence. Somebody alleging that there was some really, really serious concern that if true would’ve been absolutely disqualifying, then it becomes, okay, let’s run this down a little bit more. Let’s see, is there any sort of other corroborating evidence that might not directly prove it, but might help build a circumstantial case that, yes, this person does beat their spouse or this person is working with some group that may be concerning some white nationalist group or something like that, and so those were the ones, they weren’t common, but every once in a while you’d see something like that and it was like, alright, well maybe this warrants some additional digging.

Did it ultimately without more result in a denial or reification generally? No. I think my sort of public service announcement, I guess to the worried applicants out there, which as you say, there are plenty of them and we see lots of them on ClearanceJobs. If it is a one-off and if there is somebody out there that you’re concerned about giving investigators an earful, more often than not, the best thing to do is to just let the investigation take its course. Don’t try to preempt things, don’t try to steer the investigation because while these things in a vacuum aren’t a concern, what does become a concern is if it creates the impression that you as the applicant are trying to hide something and then maybe the underlying allegations that are being made against you wouldn’t otherwise normally get off the ground. But we have this added circumstantial evidence that the applicant looking like they’re trying to actively cover it up and now it starts to look a little more dicey. I guess that’s probably the best thing that I could say, but any parting thoughts that you would add on that?

No, I mean, I think you said it perfectly there. I mean, you’re dealing with a background investigator who is looking at the circumstances of the case and a single, individual or incident should not make you nervous.