WASHINGTON, D.C. (The Independent) — A federal contractor tasked with performing background checks on Department of Defense employees seeking high-level security clearances copped to submitting reams of bogus reports when she claimed to have thoroughly vetted candidates who, in fact, had not been properly checked out.
Of 39 allegedly fraudulent investigations Nousheen Qureshi carried out over the course of more than a year for the Defense Counterintelligence Security Agency, at least a half-dozen included fabricated “interviews” with people who later said they had never even heard from her at all, according to a plea agreement obtained first by The Independent.
“The results of the background investigations conducted by [Qureshi] were used to determine whether to grant security clearances to individuals at various levels, including and up to Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information (‘TS/SCI’) access,” states the plea agreement, which was unsealed Tuesday in Santa Ana, California federal court. “To conduct the investigations, [Qureshi] herself had TS/SCI clearance.”
Qureshi, a Mission Viejo resident, worked at the time for CACI International, a $7.7 billion Virginia-based conglomerate that bills itself as being “ever vigilant in helping our customers meet their greatest challenges in national security.” Each of the 299 background investigations she turned in between July 2020 and August 2021 had to be re-worked by the agency, costing taxpayers nearly $250,000 extra, according to the plea agreement.
Qureshi was subsequently hired by two other companies to run background checks for the Department of Homeland Security, doing more than 600 of them until her past finally came to light and she was removed from all DHS projects, the plea agreement says.
She was charged by information on June 2, and the case has not been made public until now.
Tucker Atkins, Qureshi’s court-appointed lawyer, did not respond to a request for comment on Wednesday.
Since the September 11 terrorist attacks there has been a tremendous increase in the number of security clearances issued by the federal government, according to attorney Dan Meyer, a former U.S. Navy officer who is now a national security partner in the Washington, D.C. office of Tully Rinckey, PLLC. As the system has become more and more overloaded, investigators have seen their workloads double, triple, or even quadruple to as many as 40 cases a week, Meyer told The Independent.
Along with this, the incentive to cut corners has also increased, said Meyer.
“And once they start falsifying documents, there’s a greater incentive to falsify documents because you’ve got to hide it once you’ve done it,” he said.
Further, Meyer pointed out, the Trump administration has publicly undercut the gravity of rigorous security clearances, where he said sends a message out to the rank-and-file, “who start to think, ‘Hey, maybe this isn’t so important.’”
