WASHINGTON, D.C.  Feb. 16 (DPI) – People within Washington’s national security apparatus, suspicious of the new president’s reliability and loyalties,  are apparently withholding information from him, a development that – if true – has almost no precedent in modern US presidential history.

Those reports are coming from both The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal, who obviously are citing anonymous sources, whose motivations of course may have little to do with national security.  And with the press viscerally hostile to the new administration, it’s an easy story for the media to run with.

While the US today has about 5.1 million citizens with security clearances – about 1.5% of the population – it’s not altogether clear of the value of all those trustworthy people’s work.  The press has reported on the exploding size of the national-security apparatus since 9/11; in 2010 Dana Priest of The Washington Post led a team that reported on “Top Secret America.”

Indeed, part of the populist appeal of an outsider – even the misfit Donald Trump, with his undisciplined, disorganized approach and abhorrent personal style –  was that Washington needed someone to confront not only an unresponsive political establishment but a vast and largely unaccountable post-9/11 security bureaucracy as well.

In other words, it’s altogether possible that Trump’s poor relationship with the CIA, the NSA and other smaller security agencies is a healthy development, especially if it turns out that the motivations of the national-security bureaucracy are simply to preserve their paychecks, unlikely as that is.  On the other hand, Trump and his closest associates – especially after the Flynn affair – may indeed have loyalties we still don’t know about.

The problem for the rest of America – the 98.5% with no security clearance – is all they can do now is stand by and wait.