was ongoing. christopher wray said it was closed in january. who s telling the truth here? both. the fbi portion was closed. the white house personnel security office, who is the one that makes a recommendation for adjudication had not finished their process and not made a recommendation to the white house. new questions are being raised about why white house counsel don mcgahn did not sound the alarm sooner. joining me is bob bower and b benjam benjamin. welcome both. bob, you re white house counsel, the white house staff secretary, rob porter, comes into your office in january. after january 20th, when the first week of the administration and says i ve got this problem in my personal life. i ve got two ex-wives have been
and then we administratively closed the file in january. and then earlier this month we received some additional information and we passed that on as well. a few hours after that the white house tried to explain. christopher wray said it was closed in january. so who s telling the truth here? both. as i said the fbi portion was closed, the white house personnel security office who is the one that makes a recommendation for adjudication had not finished their process and therefore had not made a recommendation to the white house. let me just clarify one more point. you said yesterday you didn t get any paperwork from the fbi. chris wray said he did submit paperwork again, that would come through the white house personnel security office which had not completed their investigation and not passed that information to the white house. did you acknowledge you did receive paperwork?
it is valentine s day, so i brought my favorites on. mr. rucker, let s take sarah huckabee sanders story at face value. is it believable that the white house personnel security office knew about this information for months but they never shared it with the administration? well, what we know, steph, is that don mcgahn, white house counsel, knew about this potentially as far back as january, according to our reporting, and that kelly found out at least in the fall. so there was a deliberate decision made inside the white house to keep rob porter in his job with access to the most sensitive national secrets, classified materials, on an interim security clearance, knowing that he had these problems in his background check, knowing that this cloud hung over him. and that s one of the reasons why kelly as well as mcgahn, frankly, are coming under so much scrutiny internally for their decision to not act upon what they knew. okay. so brett, i want to share what sarah huckabee sanders sai
of a profile. that s true. former officials previous administrations make the point that even if the white house personnel security office was alerted that there might be some sort of flag in a staffer s background, that the white house counsel would have been made aware of that. don mcgahn has a lot of questions to answer because he certainly played a critical role, we assume, in zblauftsds joe haguen is the white house deputy chief of staff for operations under president trump. if you not heard his name before. i also wonder, jeff, if it has anything to do with the russia investigation and what don mcgahn knows or doesn t know and keeping him closer to the white house is better than keeping him farther from the white house. yeah. it s hard for me to sort of delve too far into the realm of speculation, but these are the issues we re asking about and not getting clear answers on.
information last year in what they considered to be the final background investigation report in november. but they had not made a final recommendation for adjudication to the white house because the process was still ongoing when porter resigned. in the view of personnel security office, the fbi s july report required significant additional investigatory field work before personnel security office could begin to evaluate the information for adjudicationing. > sarah sanders left out of that explanation what role senior aides including white house general counsel or chief of staff may have played in that process. asked directly if top officials were in the loop, she did not give a real answer. did anyone at the white house personnel security office have any communication with anyone in the west wing about rob porter s clearance between when the fbi started submitting its internal reports. i m not aware of any communication. i can t say the definitively. i m not aware of any communic