Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Porter’s stint stirs legislator questions
Panel chief raises security concerns
The Republican chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee is investigating the White House’s employment of former senior aide Rob Porter after allegations emerged that he abused his two ex-wives.
Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., the panel’s chairman, sent letters Wednesday to FBI Director Christopher Wray and White House Chief of Staff John Kelly asking for information on what they knew about the allegations against Porter and when they knew it — an inquiry prompted by an apparent contradiction between the timeline offered by the White House and offered by Wray in congressional testimony Tuesday.
“I have real questions about how someone like this could be considered for employment,” Gowdy said Wednesday on CNN’s New Day, adding that “the chronology is not favorable for the White House.”
President Donald Trump, meanwhile, told reporters that he is “totally opposed to domestic violence of any kind.”
“Everyone knows that,” he continued Wednesday. “And it almost wouldn’t even have to be said. So, now you hear it, but you all know.” He declined to answer follow-up questions.
The president’s remarks came more than a week after the allegations against Porter first became public. Porter resigned a week ago. He has denied the allegations.
Trump had praised Porter, his former staff secretary, on Friday in his first comments about the allegations. And on Saturday, he appeared to cast doubt on the women’s allegations when he tweeted: “Peoples lives are being shattered and destroyed by a mere allegation.”
The White House has struggled to contain a widening crisis over its handling of the situation.
Wray’s testimony Tuesday to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence — indicating that the FBI raised concerns about Porter in March and that the bureau submitted a final report on Porter in late July — forced the White House to revise its official account of when top officials learned of the allegations
against Porter.
Press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Monday that “the White House had not received any specific papers regarding the completion” of Porter’s background investigation. But on Tuesday, after Wray’s testimony, she said the FBI’s report had gone to the White House “personnel security office,” which she said was staffed by civil servants rather than political appointees.
Sanders said that as far as she knew, that office hadn’t alerted any of the president’s West Wing staff members, and six months after receiving the FBI report the office still hadn’t finished “a final recommendation for adjudication” of Porter’s security clearance before he resigned last week.
The personnel security office, which makes recommendations about security clearances, is overseen by Joe Hagin, Trump’s deputy chief of staff for operations, a person familiar with the matter said.
Hagin has not responded to inquiries this week.
In past administrations, the White House counsel’s office has also been involved in vetting potential employees. Decisions on security clearances for White House staff members are ultimately up to the White House under the president’s authority.
SECURITY CLEARANCES
Gowdy’s probe encompasses the larger question of whether more White House officials are working with temporary security clearances, as Porter was, indicating
potential vetting problems.
According to the letters sent to Wray and Kelly, the House panel is “investigating the policies and practices by which interim security clearances are investigated and adjudicated within the Executive Branch, and the extent to which any security clearance issued to Porter comported with those policies and processes.”
The White House has refused to divulge the number of staff members who still do not have full clearances, though the list includes Jared Kushner, the president’s senior adviser and son-in-law.
Kushner’s attorney, Abbe Lowell, said in a statement that “there are a dozen or more people at Mr. Kushner’s level” who are working without full security clearances.
A senior administration official said as many as two dozen senior officials don’t hold permanent clearances. The official wasn’t authorized to discuss the matter and spoke on the condition of anonymity.
As the White House staff secretary, Porter was responsible for handling the flow of paperwork to and from Trump’s desk — including some of the most sensitive secrets of the federal government.
Watchdogs have raised the possibility that Porter could have been subject to blackmail by someone aware of the allegations against him. Two of Porter’s ex-wives, Colbie
Holderness and Jennifer Willoughby, as well as a former girlfriend, have publicly recounted episodes of verbal and physical abuse. One has shared pictures of a facial injury that she said Porter inflicted.
Porter has denied wrongdoing.
Gowdy’s letters come nearly a week after the allegations against Porter were revealed — prompting an initial wagon-circling from the White House, then his resignation. Questions since then have focused on whether Kelly ignored credible warnings from the FBI and kept Porter in his job.
Last week, Rep. Elijah Cummings of Maryland, the top Democrat on the Oversight and Government Reform Committee, urged Gowdy to take action, accusing Republicans of having “constructed a wall around the White House in order to prevent any credible oversight whatsoever.” Cummings pointed to Democratic requests dating back to the weeks after the 2016 presidential election for more information about security clearances for senior Trump aides.
“If you had agreed to any of our previous requests for information on these matters, the White House would have been required to answer key questions about why Mr. Porter was denied a final security clearance, who at the White House was aware of this information, and how Mr. Porter was allowed to remain in his position,” Cummings wrote.
On Wednesday, Cummings struck a more cooperative
note, commending Gowdy for creating a probe. “But obviously,” Cummings added, “the credibility of this investigation will be judged by how thorough it is in obtaining documents and interviewing witnesses, and how bipartisan it is in its conclusions.”
Cummings said he personally wished to interview Kelly, Wray and White House counsel Don McGahn.
In the letters, Gowdy requested information on the process for obtaining interim security clearance, what was known about Porter and who allowed his interim clearance. The probe will also look at when and who in the White House knew about the domestic abuse allegations.
“I think the really fair questions are: What were you told? By whom were you told it? Did you have some really good reason to question what the bureau told you? And, if none of that was true, why did you keep him on?” Gowdy said.
In his eight months as oversight panel chairman, Gowdy has spent much of his time engulfed in another committee’s work: the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence’s probe of alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election, where Republicans appear increasingly determined to focus on potential wrongdoing by federal law enforcement rather than any misdeeds committed by Trump or his campaign.
But as oversight chairman, Gowdy has occasionally taken an interest in other matters. He signed letters in September, for instance, asking for more information about senior Trump officials’ use of private or government-owned planes, as well as the use of private email accounts and text messages to conduct White House business.
The next month, however, he turned his focus to issues predating the Trump administration: an Obama administration decision to approve the sale of a U.S. uranium mining company to a Russian firm, and the role federal law enforcement played in the 2016 election — including the decision to clear Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton of criminal wrongdoing related to her use of a private email server as secretary of state.
Meanwhile, Trump’s intelligence chief called for a top-to-bottom overhaul of the security clearance process, which allowed Porter to operate in his job for more than a year with only an interim clearance.
“We have a broken system and I think everybody’s come to agree with that now,” said Dan Coats, the director of national intelligence. He called for limits on the information made accessible to those with temporary clearances — a practice that is currently not followed in the West Wing, an official said.