fundamental competence. it s one thing not to say, by the way, a white house lacking in integrity can be excused if it s competent, but here you have a white house that s wanting on both scores. to our viewers read the work just posted by our friend by ashley parker, and to our guests our thanks for starting off our tuesday conversation. bob bower, frank montoya, and ashley parker of the washington post. coming up two who have covered trump since his campaign shedding light on this chaos inside the white house tonight and the potential future of arm mentioned general kelly. and later, oh by the way, we ll report on our other top story of the evening. the u.s. is under attack, according to what one of our intelligence chiefs told congress today. we ll talk to a former u.s. ambassador to russia who s been saying that same thing. the 11th hour, we re just getting started on a tuesday evening.
i can only give you the best information i have, and that s my understanding. sarah huckabee-sanders standing by the white house account that chief of staff john kelly had no knowledge of the accusations against staff secretary rob porter until the story broke. but as we ve reported, conflicting time lines reporting to the contrary show that john kelly might be in the hot seat on this one. jonathan swan of axios got our attention today when he reported the kelly cover up is unraveling. quote, john kelly s white house enemies are ready to use fbi director s crist ray s testimony as a weapon. the time line makes one thing clear, the kelly cover up is unraveling right before our eyes, a white house official says. with us tonight robert costa, a national political reporter for
intelligence dan coates weighed in on this security situation telling the associated press, quote, we have a broken system and i think everybody s come to agree with that now. coates was later asked about the risks of temporary clearances at today s senate intel hearing. i think sometimes it is necessary to have some type of preliminary clearance in order to fill a slot, but i have public lestat publicly stated if that is the case, the access has to be limited with the kind of information they can receive or not receive. the process is broken. it needs to be reformed. these latest developments have intensified the focus on this man, white house chief of staff john kelly and how he has handled the domestic abuse allegations against rob porter and the questions about his security clearance. the wall street journal reports when kelly was asked if
that s created this huge problem for john kelly who knew about these allegations ahead of time and you know, in talking to some white house officials today, people a they believe kelly cannot be trusted, that he s lying internally about this. we re going to have more reporting on that tonight at the washington post, but it s a problem for this white house and puts the chief of staff under siege. give us something. well, what we have here is the staff inside the white house some of them are turning on john kelly. so he according to sarah sanders has the confidence of the president at this hour. but he does not have the full confidence of his subordinates who are leaking a lot of information about him. chris. i want to get to that. ken, you know who is leaking, the guys who don t like kelly. not just the truth tellers. he s got a whole regiment of enemies he s kept out of the oval office. of course account white house staff friends with and colleagues with rob porter tend
his way out and talking about the leading candidate replacement this hour. that s exactly right. with all things involving this president the usual caveats apply, which is that until trump makes a decision no decision has been made. but there is a growing sense even from when we wrote that story to when i went home this evening is that there s a sense within the white house that kelly cannot weather this storm. so the question is he out tomorrow, out this week, in a month or two? and that s the open question. but there s a sense he is not going to be able to make it as long as he said he has hoped. and part of that is being driven by the fact that the president s aides and confidants and friends asked who he should replace general kelly with. there are multiple candidates, but gary cohn is someone who has really had ups and downs with