The specifics of who did what and when throughout the Porter saga remain murky and vary based on each person’s account, but there was consensus among many staffers about one thing: Kelly misrepresented his own actions. At a February 9 senior staff meeting, after he had issued two divergent public statements about Porter, Kelly said that he had taken action to remove Porter within forty minutes of learning that abuse allegations were credible. But many staffers said Kelly’s claim of swift action was dishonest, and it contradicted the public record.
“We were like, ‘What are you saying?’” one White House adviser recalled. “He was blatantly lying. No you did not.”
Sanders and her deputies, who were tasked with accounting for the administration’s actions to a restive news media, were exasperated. Sanders was a willing warrior for Trump, at times sacrificing her own credibility in service to a president who obfuscated and lied for sport, but one day during the Porter scandal she lost it. She had had enough with the incomplete and misleading information she had been provided by her colleagues.
Standing in a hallway outside Deputy Chief of Staff Joe Hagin’s West Wing office, Sanders lit into Don McGahn, a shouting match so loud that more than a dozen staffers heard it. She told him she would not continue to speak publicly on behalf of the administration unless she was provided more information about Porter’s situation. Sanders quickly received the clarity she sought. The dispute was resolved and Sanders briefed reporters, but tensions between the press office and McGahn and Kelly persisted. “You couldn’t get a straight answer from John Kelly,” one aide recalled. “Either he was dishonest or an old man who can’t remember things.”
As Kelly refashioned his explanations for how he handled the Porter matter, he was consulting regularly with Trump. They both liked Porter a great deal and were disappointed to see him leave the White House. “We absolutely wish him well,” Trump told reporters on February 9. The president continued, saying that Porter, “as you probably know, says he’s innocent, and I think you have to remember that.”
On the night of February 9 and the morning of February 10, Trump and Kelly spoke at length about the scandal. Trump complained that lots of women make things up about men for their own benefit. “He’s a good guy,” Kelly told Trump of Porter. Maybe, Trump said, Holderness purposefully ran into a refrigerator to give herself bruises and try to get money out of Porter? The president urged his chief of staff to have the White House trumpet this injustice and explain why it was so unfair to accuse or judge a man without all the facts. The parallels between Porter and the president were obvious. More than a dozen women have accused Trump of sexual assault and harassment, and he denied each claim—although he was infamously recorded in 2005 bragging to Access Hollywood host Billy Bush about grabbing women by their genitals against their will.
In addition, the Porter case coincided with the burgeoning Stormy Daniels scandal, which had been flaring since January when The Wall Street Journal first reported hush-money payments to the porn star. Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, had been paid $130,000 in the final weeks of the 2016 campaign by Michael Cohen, Trump’s longtime personal attorney and fixer, in exchange for her silence about a sexual encounter she claimed to have had with Trump in 2006, during his first year of marriage to Melania.
The morning of February 10, Trump decided he wanted to speak out again about Porter. At 10:30 a.m., he tweeted his view to the world: “Peoples lives are being shattered and destroyed by a mere allegation. . . . There is no recovery for someone falsely accused—life and career are gone. Is there no such thing any longer as Due Process?”
The Porter scandal put a harsh spotlight on the process for obtaining security clearances. Dozens of White House officials worked under interim clearances of varying levels, having access to some of the nation’s most sensitive material while their FBI background investigations were pending. But only one of these officials mattered to the press corps—and ultimately to Trump—and that was Jared Kushner. The presidential son-in-law held a broad range of responsibilities that necessitated access to classified information, and he enjoyed regular access to the “holiest of holies” in the CIA trove of intelligence. Typically, senior officials did not stay on interim clearances for more than three months; Kushner by now had had his for thirteen months.
Amid the media scrutiny of the Porter case, Trump had directed McGahn to find out the status of the FBI investigation into Kushner’s background. On February 9, McGahn received a call on a secure phone line from Rod Rosenstein. The deputy attorney general delivered some bad news. He didn’t go into details but said there were continuing problems with Kushner’s obtaining a high-level security clearance, and to expect further delay. Rosenstein said additional investigation was required.
As Mark Corallo had foreshadowed in May 2017, there was no way someone who failed multiple times to disclose all of his or her foreign contacts would receive the highest-level security clearance through a normal process. And Kushner, who had an unusually complex history of financial transactions and business dealings with foreigners, was no exception.
Bill Daley, a former White House chief of staff and commerce secretary under Presidents Obama and Clinton, respectively, said the right course was for Kushner to follow the same rules as every other senior government official, regardless of his lineage. “A family member with no experience at anything other than real estate, no real profile other than a family-run business with a shady past, given incredibly complicated tasks was a joke,” Daley said. “People elect a president knowing so much about them, good or bad, but no one knows Jared Kushner in the game he is playing. The fact that he made so many blunders, starting with the back-channel talks with Russians, should have told one how in over his head he was.”
Kelly had been concerned with Kushner’s high level of access without a permanent clearance and was under pressure in the wake of the Porter scandal to overhaul the process for all White House clearances. On February 16, the chief of staff announced that he would be enforcing rigorous new rules that would prevent some officials with interim clearances from accessing top secret information. An aide briefed on Kelly’s thinking told The Washington Post that the chief of staff knew his policy put a “bull’s eye” on Kushner but that the rules were designed for national security and could not be ignored.
“The events of the last ten days have focused immense attention on a clearance process that has been in place for multiple administrations,” Kelly wrote in a memo outlining the new policy. “We should—and in the future, must—do better.”
The credibility that made Kelly such an asset in Trump’s White House, which he had earned on the battlefield, was now tainted by his work in the Porter saga. Kelly’s friends said the portrait of him in service to Trump bore little resemblance to the leader they had come to know. “This is a man who, across the Corps for 40 years, was considered to be the exemplar of moral principle and integrity,” John R. Allen, a retired four-star Marine Corps general, said amid the Porter scandal. “He was a selfless servant in every possible way—a lot of personal courage, moral courage to do the right thing. His values were very powerfully formed, and it’s just difficult for me to find in my memory of my service with him a flaw.”