The FBI told White House lawyer Don McGahn that Rob Porter abused his wives more than a year ago

Jonathan Ernst/Reuters

White House chief of staff John Kelly and former staff secretary Rob Porter

• The FBI first alerted White House counsel Don McGahn to allegations of violent spousal abuse made against former White House staff secretary Rob Porter in March 2017, according to a new and more detailed timeline the FBI provided to Congress.
• The new information contradicts the White House's claim that the March 2017 report only contained basic employment information, rather than allegations of abuse.

The FBI first alerted White House counsel Don McGahn to allegations of violent spousal abuse made against former White House staff secretary Rob Porter in March 2017, according to a new and more detailed timeline the FBI provided to Congress, The New York Times reported Thursday.

The new information contradicts the White House's claim that the March 2017 report only contained basic employment information, rather than allegations of abuse.

Porter resigned in February after his two former wives publicly alleged that he physically and verbally abused them for years. The White House aggressively defended Porter before backing off after photographic evidence of the allegations emerged, and has maintained that top White House officials did not know about the allegations until days before Porter resigned.

In an April 13 letter to the leaders of the House committee investigating how Porter was able to receive a security clearance, an FBI official said the bureau addressed its March 3, 2017 "partial report" containing "derogatory information" about Porter to McGahn.

The Times first reported on the letter on Thursday.

But a White House official told The Times that McGahn never read that report.

"Don never saw it," the official said. "The right people never saw it."

The FBI then sent a full report on Porter to the White House in July 2017, which apparently did not detail the nature of the derogatory information about Porter. According to the letter, the FBI was asked by the White House personnel security office in August for more information on Porter, "including, but not limited to, re-interviews of Mr. Porter, his ex-wives and his girlfriend at the time."

The FBI then provided the White House with a new report containing "additional derogatory information" in November. The bureau closed its investigation on January 3, 2018 and passed along some additional information on Porter on February 7.

Rep. Elijah Cummings, the ranking Democrat on the House committee, told the Times that the White House has not fully cooperated with the investigation into its process surrounding security clearances.

"The F.B.I. has now confirmed that it repeatedly provided derogatory information to the White House about Rob Porter as far back as March of 2017," Cummings told the Times. "But White House officials ignored this information and continued granting Porter access to our nation's most highly classified secrets - just as they did with Michael Flynn and Jared Kushner."