somebody that had access to every piece of pipe there crossed the president s desk. it s emerging not only that there were credible domestic violence allegations against rob porter that the white house was aware of while in the senior role, allegations he denies but role but also the allegations were sufficient to deny him a security clearance, as a member of the oversight committee, what exactly are your concerns here and what do you think should happen next? one of the biggest concerns i have, rachel, is a conspiracy, if you can put it that way, between the republicans in the house, especially in our committee, and the white house to make sure that nothing is investigated. nothing is pursued. no subpoenas are issued. we re chaired by trey gowdy, who was the head of benghazi. his hand got tired of writing subpoenas. he wrote millions of pages of documents. millions of dollars of taxpayer money that went nowhere.
clearance, that means somebody provided him with classified information without him being cleared to see it and without the president waving the clearance process. isn t that illegal? joining us now is sean patrick maloney. he once served in the clinton administration in the job rob porter held until yesterday. congressman, really good to have you with us tonight. thatening y . good to be with you. do you routinely handle highly classified information? spot on. there isn t a day that goes on that there aren t a stack of red folders on the desk marked top secret. they are often above that level of secrecy. they go all the way up themselves classified and there is a burn bag because when you describe materials, it will be a special team.
white house counsel and the white house chief of staff don mcgahn and john kelly apparently sat on that information and did nothing about it. they certainly did nothing to get rob porter out of that job or away from classified information that he was explicitly not cleared to see. when president trump decided to ignore the fact jared kushner couldn t get a security clear ranl ing, jared kushner s family, the president felt comfortable blowing off fbi concerns about him and he cleared jared kushner to see everything but with rob porter, the white house is letting us know that the president had no idea that there was any sort of problem with him. and yet, he put him in this job, he allowed him to continue in this job where he saw and handled all the information that passed the president s desk including classified materials. did the president not know, did
materials it will be collected by a special team and insin rated that night. i don t think people understand. the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, they don t give memos to the president. they give them to the staff secretary and the secretary manages those doubts as they go to the oval office. you see everything. in terms of mr. porter, it has emerged as parts of this story about his personal difficulties that that much information was conveyed to the fbi and that information was conveyed to the white house. even aside from the story about these domestic violations against him, how unusual is it that somebody would be in the staff secretary position without a permanent security clearance of any kind with just an interim clearance? that blows my mind. let me give you one example. when i was going through this background check, the fbi sent agencies from uruguay from their office there to the small peruvian village where i did social work with the jesuits between college and la
who decided to not help us with this little short hop refueling plan, the means by which we have been limping along for the last few months trying to get to the coast. so we will watch this slow-motion disaster unfold over the entire course of this evening into the wee hours. meanwhile, the white house is reeling rob porter held the top rank of white house staffer, technically an assistant to the president, which is the highest rank you can be in the white house. his departure makes him the most recent name on what is the fairly epic list of high-level trump administration staff departures thus far. look how small the front is