How Tricia Newbold found her voice and exposed a national security scandal.
When Donald Trump and his advisers arrived at the White House for their first real day of work on January 21, 2017, they inherited over 1,800 civil service employees who have more-or-less permanent jobs in the sprawling executive office of the presidency. One of them was Tricia Newbold, who over the past 16 years had risen from an entry-level job answering phones to a manager of security clearances.No senior official in memory had been denied a clearance or removed because of a security problem.
“That was the first time I ever felt disabled,” she tells Newsweek in a wide-ranging interview in early April. “It was really hard for me to accept who I was. I’d never accepted I was little, I never identified with being little, and here it was.” At work she remained strong, but at home at night her composure would crack. Until last year, she says, her children “didn’t even know what the word dwarf meant.
Newbold couldn’t manage that. Instead, she struggled through school, nurtured by loving teachers and parents. No one “ever thought of her as not being able to do the same as everybody else,” Dionne says. Her mother clerked at the local Zayre store. Until her father fell ill recently, he toiled in the paper mill and worked on cars on the side.
But her time working for Kline, she says, tested her resolve. Nobody else in the security offices, headquartered across from the White House in Lafayette Square, spoke up for her, she says. “Not one of them ever came and helped. Not one. These are people that I had worked with for years. I can’t even speak to why they failed to act the way the law, and I guess humanity, would expect them to act.
Another former Obama White House lawyer, who asked not to be named, tells Newsweek , “Nobody ever had reason to ask, ‘What do you think of Tricia?’” Then again, the source adds, “I don’t recall the appointment or nomination of someone who had to subsequently resign because he or she didn’t get the clearance required to do the job.”
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