FBI Letter Casts Further Doubt on White House’s Rob Porter Timeline

WASHINGTON — The FBI first gave the White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II, a file containing spousal abuse allegations against Rob Porter in March 2017, according to a detailed new timeline the bureau has given to Congress that casts further doubt on the West Wing’s account of how accusations against one of President Donald Trump’s closest advisers were handled.

Porter, Trump’s staff secretary, resigned under pressure in February after allegations he had been physically violent toward two former wives were aired in the press. The White House — which initially sprang to his defense — has issued several competing accounts of how Trump’s team handled the allegations, which they insisted no senior officials knew about until just before Porter left his job.

But in a letter this month to the leaders of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, which is investigating how Porter could have received a security clearance given the allegations, a top official at the FBI said that on March 3, 2017, the bureau sent a “partial report” on Porter “addressed to the Counsel to the President, Donald F. McGahn, which contained derogatory information.” A former federal law enforcement official said the violent abuse allegations were included in that file.

The FBI furnished a more complete report to the White House personnel security office in July, according to the letter, which did not detail the nature of the derogatory information.

McGahn could not be reached for comment on the report. But a White House official said he never saw it, and that aides believe it was reviewed by an underling and passed on to the White House personnel security office, which reviews FBI background investigations as part of its process for evaluating whether officials should receive security clearances.

McGahn, the official said, was busy at the time juggling the Supreme Court confirmation process for Neil Gorsuch, the selection of appeals court judges and the vetting of numerous Cabinet nominees.

“Don never saw it,” the official said, insisting on anonymity to describe internal procedures. “The right people never saw it.”

White House officials initially claimed that the West Wing had not received an FBI report in March on Porter — and that any such information would only have been provided to the personnel security office, which is staffed by career officials. Two people briefed on its contents previously said the March report contained only basic employment information about Porter, not allegations of abuse.

The FBI’s attempt to inform McGahn of damaging information about Porter was described in an April 13 letter from Gerald Roberts Jr., the assistant director of the FBI’s security division, to Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., chairman of the oversight panel, and Rep. Elijah E. Cummings of Maryland, the committee’s ranking Democrat. The Times obtained a copy of the letter.

Porter’s former wives have said the FBI interviewed them about their abuse claims in January 2017. Porter himself also alerted McGahn that an aggrieved ex-wife was making potentially damaging accusations about him, according to a person familiar with the discussion. Roberts’ letter says that in August, the bureau received a request from the White House personnel security office for additional information on Porter, “including, but not limited to, re-interviews of Mr. Porter, his ex-wives and his girlfriend at the time.”

In November, the FBI gave the White House another report, Roberts wrote, “which contained additional derogatory information.”

The FBI’s timeline is at odds with the one given by top officials including John F. Kelly, the White House chief of staff, who acknowledged in March that he had stumbled in his response to the allegations against Porter but insisted that he had not known of the damaging accusations until the week Porter left.

Background investigations often uncover derogatory information, and one person familiar with Porter’s said the allegations of abuse and the circumstances surrounding them were not as clear-cut as they were portrayed to be when they surfaced in the media, making it difficult to discern whether they warranted action. Even though the White House now appears to have known for months about the claims against Porter, his temporary clearance was never revoked.

The White House’s contention that McGahn never saw the original FBI report comes at a time it is facing fresh questions about its process for vetting personnel for top posts in Trump’s administration, after Dr. Ronny L. Jackson, the White House physician who was his pick to be the secretary of Veterans Affairs, withdrew on Thursday amid damaging allegations that he drank on the job, overprescribed medication and presided over a hostile work environment.

Like Jackson, Porter was among a small circle of senior officials who spent their days in proximity to Trump. As staff secretary, Porter handled the reams of sensitive documents that flow through the president’s office on a daily basis. The allegations against him were one reason he could not obtain a permanent security clearance, and the scandal surrounding his departure highlighted a pattern at the White House of allowing senior officials who had not been given permanent clearance to see classified information to serve in the highest echelons of the White House.

Kelly has revised clearance procedures at the White House, stripping interim clearances from some senior officials who had been working with temporary ones for months, most prominently Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser. Among the changes Kelly instituted was a new requirement that if the FBI uncovers “significantly derogatory” information about a White House official, it must brief the White House counsel in person on the material. The White House official said McGahn specifically requested the change to rectify what happened in Porter’s case, when he felt he was being held responsible for having information that he had, in fact, never seen.

Cummings said the new information showed a cavalier attitude at the White House toward granting access to classified information.

“The FBI has now confirmed that it repeatedly provided derogatory information to the White House about Rob Porter as far back as March of 2017,” he said. “But White House officials ignored this information and continued granting Porter access to our nation’s most highly classified secrets — just as they did with Michael Flynn and Jared Kushner.”

Cummings said the White House had refused to give the oversight panel documents it had requested or make staff members available for interviews on the matter, and he criticized Gowdy for failing to issue subpoenas to obtain the material. Congressional officials said the White House Counsel’s Office had briefed Gowdy and Cummings on April 11, but had declined to give the lawmakers any information about how security clearances had been handled in the past, speaking only about how they would be handled in the future.