Secret Service Raised Alarms About Natalie Harp’s Round-The-Clock Access to Trump, and It Turned Out She’d Been Working Near Him for a Year with No Clearance
· Thought Catalog
Updated 53 seconds ago, August 21, 2026
Natalie Harp sits a few feet from Trump all day, filtering much of what he reads and overhearing his most sensitive calls. She did that for more than a year without the security clearance every other West Wing staffer completes on day one, refusing to file the forms until Trump himself told her to.
Harp declined for more than a year to fill out the SF-86, the routine form that starts a federal background investigation for West Wing staff, according to two people familiar with the matter, as reported by MSNOW. She only completed it in recent months, after the White House counsel’s office and security officials pushed back and the president stepped in.
Her reasons for holding out are unknown. What isn’t in dispute is how close she gets: a national security official said her access to sensitive information, in the West Wing and the residence, exceeds that of nearly all other senior officials.
Nicknamed the “Human Printer,” the 35-year-old delivers Trump stacks of printouts every day, including favorable coverage and poll numbers from questionable sources. One person said she “plays into the less productive and more troublesome parts of his nature, putting things in front of him that aren’t vetted.”
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Secret Service concerns during Trump’s first year back in office centered on both her unbridled access and her missing clearance. Attempts by senior staff to quietly limit her round-the-clock proximity failed. “She is just persistent and not realizing that’s what they were trying to do,” one person said.
Harp joined Trump’s orbit ahead of the 2024 campaign after speaking at the 2020 Republican National Convention and hosting on the far-right network One America News. Last month she was among the handful of aides who left Air Force One with Trump inside a catering cart during a security scare in Turkey.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Harp “has a security clearance like everyone else, and she is a loyal and hardworking member of President Trump’s team.”
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