Kelly Orders Overhaul to White House Security Clearance After Abuse Claims

WASHINGTON — John Kelly, the White House chief of staff, ordered an overhaul of the process for granting security clearances, acknowledging that mistakes and shortcomings were exposed by the handling of marital abuse allegations against one of President Donald Trump’s top aides.

In a five-page memo distributed Friday afternoon to White House staff, Kelly suggested that there were serious shortcomings with the system for vetting top-level officials with access to the United States’ most closely guarded secrets.

“We should — and, in the future, must — do better,” Kelly wrote in a document addressed to senior White House officials and copied to the directors of the country’s intelligence and law enforcement agencies. The Washington Post first reported the existence of the memo.

Kelly did not directly address the case of the aide, Rob Porter, who was forced out of his job as the White House staff secretary this month after news reports that his two former wives had claimed physical and emotional abuse by Porter during their marriages.

The White House has been reeling for more than a week amid shifting explanations of how Porter was allowed to remain in one of the most sensitive posts there despite the FBI’s discovery of the abuse allegations months ago.

The deepening scandal called into question the administration’s veracity as Republicans and Democrats pressured Kelly to detail what had happened. The memo does not do that.

But Kelly is putting in effect changes that will address a failure of communication between the FBI and senior officials in the West Wing — exactly the kind of failure that White House officials have said was responsible in Porter’s case.

Among the most significant changes, Kelly ordered that FBI officials will now directly report to the White House counsel, Don McGahn, any concerns they uncover during the background investigations of the president’s top aides.

Kelly said that would ensure that “critical material will be differentiated from the ordinary volume of communications and delivered quickly and directly to the appropriate person rather than through layers of intermediaries.”

White House officials had earlier said that they were unaware of the allegations against Porter because the FBI had reported their concerns to a security office staffed by career officials who did not communicate to the West Wing.