White House Seeks to Move On From Abuse Scandal. But What Did It Learn?

On Day 10 of a scandal over spousal abuse that laid bare the internal dysfunction and public relations miscalculations that have racked the Trump White House, John F. Kelly, the chief of staff, issued a memo widely seen as an effort to turn the page.

The five-page document ordered a review of security clearance procedures that had allowed Rob Porter, the now-fired staff secretary, to handle highly classified materials even though the abuse allegations had prevented him from receiving a permanent clearance.

But Kelly’s memo was more than just an attempt to move on, one White House official said. It was tantamount to a recognition that a system for dealing with a problem like the one involving Porter did not exist.

In a West Wing where senior officials have developed something of a bunker mentality to keep the chaos at bay and survive each day, this better-not-to-know approach allowed the Porter problem to fester and raises questions about whether the White House is capable of creating a system with greater accountability.

White House aides insist that the Kelly memo is not just a bid for better headlines — it would dramatically improve a clearance process that had gotten out of hand, they said. But what Kelly has not publicly proposed is investigating precisely how the unsettling episode occurred.

There would be much to investigate. A few senior officials in the West Wing had access to details of the allegations of physical and emotional abuse made by Porter’s ex-wives. A greater number of people had a sense that something was amiss, but chose to avert their gaze instead of asking questions.

The first hours after the issue was brought to light by an article in The Daily Mail were a confused blur, with officials like Kelly at first endorsing Porter’s resignation, but then agreeingto issue statements in support of him. That disarray belied the belief of some in the White House that someone — Kelly — was finally in charge after six months of drama and infighting in 2017. In reality, these officials now concede, no one truly was.

“They haven’t figured out how the place operates, and apparently they don’t want to learn,” said John Dean, a White House counsel under President Richard M. Nixon. The Porter situation, he added, “is a manifestation of what happens when you have chaos.”

Kelly, a four-star Marine general, had been billed as uniquely qualified to bring order to President Donald Trump’s world when he took his post in July. Now he faces a morale crisis in the West Wing, where aides describe a sense of betrayal by a chief of staff they no longer trust after his claims that he had not fully known about Porter’s problems and had acted within minutes once he learned of them.

But above all, White House veterans say, Trump is responsible for the haphazard nature with which his operation has functioned, in part because he knew and cared little for the rules and norms that govern the executive branch. Unprepared to fill the ranks of a new administration, Trump never tried to set a tone of discipline or ethical rigor in his West Wing.

“A White House reflects the president,” said William M. Daley, a chief of staff under Obama. “So he moves on to the next scandal, crisis, attack, whatever, and no self-reflection. So why should anyone be surprised that that sort of becomes the MO, even when there’s a belief that there’s institutional stuff one should consider.” For 13 months, Trump’s aides have approached their mercurial and process-averse boss by putting their heads down and ignoring what they could not control, avoiding information that could rattle their daily balance.

But in the case of Porter, White House aides privately acknowledge, some advisers appear to have chosen to try to protect a colleague who was generally well liked and, more important, too competent to lose. Trump himself often expressed his regard for Porter by describing him as “out of central casting.”

In the hours after the allegations against Porter became public, some senior officials in fact hesitated to force him out, in part because they argued that if one top adviser could be felled by accusations, they could all potentially be vulnerable. Porter denied privately to his colleagues, as well as publicly, that he had ever physically abused his wives.

What distinguished this crisis from the ones that preceded it was that it was not localized to one official, such as Stephen Bannon, the isolated chief strategist who left in August, or Reince Priebus, the often uninformed chief of staff who departed a month before that. Porter’s case had spread to so many aspects of the White House that it ensnared a number of staff members.

While multiple officials in the West Wing were aware that he had been unable to pass his background check, none appear to have made an effort to ascertain precisely why and take action on it. Several former White House counsels have said they would have made it their business to know if an official at Porter’s level was facing allegations as serious as domestic abuse, but officials in the White House have privately maintained that Donald F. McGahn II, the White House counsel, never did.

“They plainly abided a situation that was intolerable, and they shouldn’t have done it,” said Robert F. Bauer, a White House counsel under President Barack Obama.

C. Boyden Gray, who served as White House counsel under President George Bush, said the problems might have been exacerbated by the existence of the special counsel investigation into Russian election meddling and potential Trump campaign ties to it.

McGahn and other senior officials may be reluctant to engage with the FBI or the Justice Department on security clearances or any other matter, for fear of being drawn into the inquiry, he said. “You just didn’t want to call the FBI or call the DOJ on any subject, Russia or not,” Gray said of officials in the West Wing. “That may have contributed to the breakdown here.” What’s more, Trump has been in open war with the FBI for months, a fact that some West Wing aides believe contributed to the debacle.

The dismissal Wednesday of George David Banks, who was the White House point person on climate change, was seen as a particularly galling move after 13 months in which nobody in the West Wing had seemed particularly concerned about enforcing a standard for past conduct.

Banks had been told that he would not be granted a full security clearance. In an interview, he said the reason was that he had smoked marijuana a handful of times between 2010 and 2013, conduct that he said he had self-reported to the FBI nearly a year ago.

“It was unbelievable,” Banks said of the decision to deny him a clearance, which he learned about abruptly at the end of a workday, when an official from McGahn’s office and a human resources aide appeared in his office, informed him of the decision, asked him to gather his things and escorted him from the premises.

Inside the West Wing, officials said, Banks is seen as collateral damage in a belated effort by Kelly and other top officials to show they are cracking down on interim security clearances.

Yet former White House advisers from both parties have been mystified at the ineptitude of Trump’s team in dealing with the fallout from Porter’s situation.

Part of the problem, they argue, is a culture at the White House that does not appear to prioritize getting at the truth.

“The fundamentals of Crisis Management 101 were certainly not observed here, but more importantly, there does not seem to be a priority on marshaling and disclosing the facts, whatever they may be,” said Jack Quinn, who served as White House counsel under Bill Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky affair. “They need to stop the bleeding, and I think that they’ve got to understand that the bleeding is not going to stop until the full truth is told.”