Murat Piker is an aerospace engineer at Boeing. He has security clearances. He has spent years working on the VC-25B — the technical designation for the new Air Force One — and the E-6B, the nuclear "Doomsday Plane" designed to maintain command-and-control communications during a nuclear war.

His older brother is Hasan Piker, the far-left Twitch streamer who has gone to bat for many DSA candidate including Abdul El-Sayed and once said America "deserved 9/11."

The Washington Free Beacon's Jon Levine published the investigation Tuesday, and the juxtaposition is the kind of thing that makes you wonder if anyone at the Department of Defense has access to the internet. Hasan Piker — a self-described socialist who has built a multimillion-dollar streaming empire on anti-American rhetoric, who traveled to Cuba with CodePink co-founder Medea Benjamin and is currently under federal investigation for the trip, who was detained and questioned by Customs and Border Protection at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport — has a brother with security clearances to work on the aircraft that carries the President and the aircraft designed to survive nuclear war.

Murat Piker graduated from Rutgers University's Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and has worked at Boeing for over a decade. His LinkedIn profile — which Levine's investigation draws from — lists his role in Boeing's space vehicle structures design division. The E-6B program he worked on is one of the most classified in the American military arsenal. It's the plane that would relay launch orders to nuclear submarines if Washington gets vaporized. That's the level of clearance we're talking about.

Now, the obvious response from the "well, actually" crowd is that Murat Piker is not his brother. People are individuals. A man shouldn't be judged by his sibling's politics. And if we were talking about a brother who voted differently or posted some mildly spicy takes on Twitter, that would be a reasonable position. But we're not talking about a guy whose brother has a Biden bumper sticker. We're talking about a guy whose brother is under active federal investigation, whose brother has promoted hostile foreign governments on camera, whose brother has been physically detained by federal agents at an international port of entry.

Security clearance reviews are supposed to evaluate "the whole person" — including close associates and family ties that could create vulnerability to coercion, influence, or exploitation. That's not a conservative talking point. That's Standard Form 86, the questionnaire every clearance applicant fills out. It specifically asks about close relatives and their foreign contacts, associations, and activities.

Hasan Piker, for his part, just watched his political influence take a measurable hit. Last week, Wisconsin state Rep. Francesca Hong — the progressive candidate Piker backed as her self-described "biggest surrogate" — lost the Democratic gubernatorial primary to Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley by roughly 4,000 votes, despite polls showing her up by 15 points and prediction markets giving her 96 percent odds. Piker's post-loss meltdown included calling to "outlaw Thanksgiving" and "outlaw boomers." Two of his DSA picks in Florida lost this week as well.

So here's where we are. A man who wants to outlaw Thanksgiving because his candidate lost a primary — a man under federal investigation for traveling to a hostile communist nation — a man who streams anti-American content to millions of young viewers for a living — has a brother engineering the plane that keeps the nuclear chain of command intact.

The Free Beacon investigation doesn't allege that Murat Piker has done anything wrong. That's not the point. The point is that security clearance protocols exist precisely for situations like this, and somebody somewhere had to review this file and decide it was fine. Somebody looked at the applicant's brother — the one with the federal investigation, the Cuba trip, the "America deserved 9/11" clip, the CBP detention — and checked the box.

That box-checker has some explaining to do.