BREAKING: FBI Puts White House’s Rob Porter Timeline In To Question

Ugh.

This entire situation is so messy. As I mentioned a few days back, I was far from impressed with how President Trump handled the Rob Porter situation to begin with.

I am the FIRST to defend Trump when I think he’s being unfairly attacked (which is virtually always), but that doesn’t mean I should keep my mouth shut when I disagree. I thought his remarks missed an important opportunity to condemn domestic violence regardless of Porter’s innocence or guilt.

Just come out and say that you take Domestic Violence seriously and you fully condemn it. That’s it. It should have been done. It would have been easy.

Well, the FBI is now disputing the White House’s timeline…. and things just got a lot messier.

According to this:

FBI director Christopher Wray said Tuesday that the White House was given four separate reports about disgraced former aide Rob Porter’s security clearance investigation – with the first heads-up coming 11 months ago.

The bombshell development could put White House Chief of Staff John Kelly and White House Counsel Don McGahn on the hot seat as they face new questions about what they knew and when they knew it.

Responding to a question from Oregon Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden during a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing, Wray spelled out the process in which the bureau ‘briefed’ the White House while Porter was operating with a temporary clearance and had access to some of America’s most closely held secrets.

‘The FBI submitted a partial report on the investigation in question in March, and then a completed background investigation in late July,’ Wray said, adding that ‘soon thereafter we received requests for [a] followup inquiry, and we did the followup and provided that information in November.’

Yeah. None of this is good news.

And while I KNOW that some of you are going to attack me for “siding with the FBI” …we have to put this all in perspective. We can’t just dismiss anything and everything the FBI says because they’re the new “enemy.” We’re smarter than that.

I will not defend things I do not agree with. If this is accurate, I think it’s indefensible… It’s that simple.

Wray added that the FBI ‘administratively closed the file in January,’ directly contradicting the White House’s account.

‘Then earlier this month we received some additional information and we passed that along as well,’ he said

He also declared that ‘in this particular instance the FBI followed established protocol.’

Porter was forced out of his job as President Donald Trump’s staff secretary this month following DailyMail.com reports about domestic violence accusations from his two ex-wives.

Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats said Tuesday – without mentioning Porter by name – that while it can be ‘necessary to have some type of preliminary clearance in order to fill a slot,’ people with such temporary statuses shouldn’t have the same contact with classified material as people with permanent clearances.

‘Access has to be limited in terms of the kinds of information they can be in a position to receive or not receive,’ Coats said.

If they DID have this information on Rob Porter, I don’t understand why it was necessary to add him to the team. Especially given all of the ridiculous crap President Trump gets for being a “misogynist.”

Why not just avoid this situation completely?

Did they really think it wouldn’t eventually get out?

The news that the FBI’s background check was completed and the file closed last month flies in the face of what the White House has publicly said.

‘In the case of Rob Porter, we relied on the background check investigative process. That process hadn’t been completed, so we were relying on the information that we had,’ White House principal deputy press secretary Raj Shah told reporters last Thursday.

It’s unclear from Wray’s testimony who at the White House received information from the FBI.

Why is this even happening?

Such a ridiculous distraction. This was completely unnecessary. We have WAY more important things to deal with than defending some dude with a shady track record.