The pattern isn’t altogether uncommon. USIS, the contractor that used to supply two thirds of the security clearances for much of the intelligence community, appears to have spiraled from a few faulty checks to thousands. At first, it seemed like one rogue employee had submitted sixteen hundred falsified credit reports; one bad apple does not a rotten tree make. But by January 2014, it had become clear that it wasn’t a bad apple. According to the Department of Justice’s suit, that was but the tip of a much larger scandal: the company had faked well over half a million background checks between
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