Top White House staff are such a mess over their mishandling of wife-beating former staff secretary Rob Porter that they can’t quite decide if he resigned or was fired. But the mishandling part? That is crystal clear. People in the White House had known for months about Porter, and yet they managed to be forced into multiple story changes and backtracking when the story broke, as if it was entirely new news.
While Chief of Staff John Kelly has taken most of the heat for the series of screw-ups—and earned that heat—he’s not the only senior aide who had a chance to do the right thing and get ahead of a damaging story simultaneously: White House counsel Don McGahn also knew about Porter.
But boy, John Kelly. Politico reports that Kelly had decided weeks ago that aides who didn’t get full security clearance would be fired. Yet even though he knew that Porter would be denied security clearance, Kelly not only didn’t fire Porter ahead of the reports of his history of abuse, he stood by him as the first reports came out, describing Porter in glowing terms. Even Kelly’s walkback of his initial support for Porter specified that “I stand by my previous comments of the Rob Porter that I have come to know.”
On Thursday, Kelly apparently felt it necessary to clarify to White House staff that domestic violence is bad, in an email saying that “I want you to know that we all take matters of domestic violence seriously. Domestic violence is abhorrent and has no place in our society.” Which … when your support for an abuser forces you to make sure that everyone knows you think domestic violence is bad, you can take that as a sign that you screwed up along the way.
Many of the scandals coming out of this White House have come straight from Donald Trump. We spend a lot of time talking about how difficult it is for his staff to have a consistent message when he might undermine it in a tweet 10 minutes later, and how Trump promotes infighting among staff. But in this case, Trump genuinely seems to have been out of the loop, reminding us once again that the staff he’s handpicked are both terrible people and very well capable of screwing things up all on their own.