NO TUNNEL VISION IN PLAN
The former White House staffer who resigned last week over accusations of domestic abuse against both his ex-wives was encouraged to “stay and fight” by senior advisers in the West Wing, according to a report Sunday.
Rob Porter, the staff secretary and close aide to White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, also claimed in conversations with associates that he “never misrepresented anything” to Kelly about the abuse claims that surfaced last Tuesday, Axios reported.
But a congressional source told the news site that while Porter alerted Kelly that a story about his messy divorce, including allegations of emotional abuse, would be published by the Daily Mail, he denied there was physical abuse.
When the story broke, Kelly confronted Porter and called on him to resign, but others urged him to stay and fight.
When a photo of his first exwife with a bruised eye surfaced on Wednesday, Porter offered his resignation and Kelly accepted it, Axios reported.
Sunday, White House counselor Kellyanne Conway claimed Porter is the target of “an orchestrated smear campaign,” echoing words the staffer used in a statement last week denying the claims.
Asked to explain, Conway reiterated a tweet from President Trump on Saturday.
“When the president is talking about due process, he’s right in this way: We are a country of laws, there is due process,” she said on CNN’s “State of the Union,” referring to the legal requirement that the state respect a subject’s rights. “But we as individuals have a duty to assess everybody on a case-to-case basis.”
She also said she has “no reason not to believe the women.”
“In this case, you have contemporaneous police reports, you have women speaking to the FBI under threat of perjury, you have police reports, you have photographs, and when you look at all of that pulled together, Rob Porter did the right thing by resigning,” Conway said.
In a tweet Saturday, Trump apparently addressed the Porter situation and the #MeToo movement by claiming that “peoples [sic] lives are being shattered and destroyed by a mere allegation.
“Is there no such thing any longer as Due Process?” he asked.