It was going to be a miserable day when you got to the office and found 60 Minutes waiting. Change that to dailymail.com and you should have the same sense of impending doom. The Daily Mail is a London tabloid that has built its circulation and website on stories and images of beautiful celebrities.
Lately, it’s been obsessed with Hope Hicks, Trump’s 29-year-old confidant and White House communications director. Seemingly omnipresent during travel and Oval Office events, Hicks usually stayed in the background. That changed after a Tokyo state dinner where Hicks was stunning in black tux.
Her beauty and prominence made her a natural tabloid subject along with Ivanka and Melania; like Melania, Hicks is a former model.
The Daily Mail’s new and constant attention to Hicks inevitably led to Trump Staff Secretary Rob Porter.
Initially, online photos showed Porter and Hicks walking together after hours but among London tabloids, what you see isn’t all you’re going to get.
The Daily Mail then published photos of Hicks and “lover” Porter, kissing in a car and coming and going from her apartment.
Then the real story began to emerge. The Daily Mail veered from salacious into serious questions of national security with interviews with Porter’s ex-wives. They accused him of physical and mental abuse. One provided a photo of her black eye, which she blamed on Porter. A young woman with whom Porter was living when he began dating Hicks told The Daily Mail a similar story.
Porter denied the domestic abuse accusations. Despite fulsome praise from senior White House colleagues, Porter resigned.
And it doesn’t end there.
American reporters were on the story and it became the classic “what did they know and when did they know it.”
Despite the bland title of Staff Secretary, Porter was at the president’s elbow. He often handled top-secret documents without the required security clearance.
As the scandal unraveled, administration officials told contradictory stories about when Chief of Staff John Kelly knew he had a problem with Porter.
After talking to Porter’s former wives, the FBI wouldn’t clear Porter for his required security clearance.
Reporters tried unsuccessfully to learn why Kelly hadn’t asked the bureau for its reasons. Or if Kelly knew the answer, why he was untroubled. Kelly was, after all, supposed to bring order to Oval Office and West Wing chaos.
More than one critic suggested Porter was vulnerable to blackmail.
Reporters began asking what the FBI knew after women said they’d complained about Porter to White House officials and the FBI months earlier.
Meanwhile one voice was surprisingly silent: Trump whining about “fake news.”
That, however, couldn’t last. Trump must dominate the news cycle but Hicks-Porter-Kelly sidelined him. Finally, he defended his departing aide/secretary: “I found out about it recently and I was surprised by it. But we certainly wish him well. It’s obviously a tough time for him. He did a very good job when he was in the White House and we hope he has a wonderful career, and hopefully he will have a great career ahead of him.
“It was very sad when we heard about it and certainly he’s also very sad. Now he also, as you probably know, he says he’s innocent. And I think you have to remember that. He said very strongly yesterday that he’s innocent. So you’ll have to talk to him about that. But we absolutely wish him well. He did a very good job when he was at the White House.”
Then Trump doubted the women’s veracity and complained how such accusations could ruin a man’s career.
Almost every story noted the absence of any mention of Porter’s former wives and their accusations.
No surprise, given Trump’s unbroken record of contempt for women when they’re not on display or in his bed. As Vice News recalled, the braggart sexual predator told New York Magazine in 1992, “Women, you have to treat them like shit.”
Or Trump’s infamous assertion of privilege, “When you’re a star… you can do anything. …Grab them by the pussy.”
The Daily Mail wasn’t about to leave it there: “Trump’s astonishing defense of a man accused of a long history of domestic abuse was reminiscent of Trump’s decision to side with accused child molester Roy Moore in November as the Alabama Republican was in a tight race for the U.S. Senate. ‘He totally denies it. He says it didn’t happen,’ Trump said of Moore as he left the White House for the Thanksgiving holiday last year. ‘And, you know, you have to listen to him also.’ “
Burned by missing the initial story, the Washington Post swarmed spreading White House disarray. It reported that Kelly told senior aides to contradict public accounts and what others in the White House said about the Porter debacle. The Post said Kelly “first learned of the domestic violence allegations against Porter months ago.” Yet he told his staff to say he took action within 40 minutes of learning that the former wives’ accusations were credible.
The Post also reported that Kelly informally offered to resign, but as of my deadline, he hadn’t quit.
Then a second White House staffer resigned and The Daily Mail called him a “wife beater.” Speech-writer David Sorensen’s former wife — Jessica Corbett — said he was physically violent and emotionally abusive.
The Post said Corbett contacted its reporters before the Porter story broke. Sorensen quit when he realized reporters were looking into Corbett’s abuse claim and her assertion that she told the FBI about it last fall during his background check. It wasn’t clear whether he was working without clearance or the White House knew and didn’t care.
Sorensen said he was the victim of violence, not his then-wife.
Again, the White House claimed ignorance until Post reporters called last week.
The Post also reported that son-in-law Jared Kushner and others lack permanent security clearances.
Speculation also began about Hope Hicks’ fate. Apart from the expanding sexual abuse furor involving Porter, Sorensen and Kelly, Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller is interested in what she knows about Trump ties to Russia and when she learned it.
Contact Ben L. Kaufman: letters@citybeat.com
This article appears in Feb 14-21, 2018.