Sinking in the Swamp by Lachlan Markay & Asawin Suebsaeng

Author:Lachlan Markay & Asawin Suebsaeng
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2020-02-10T16:00:00+00:00

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WHEN the Daily Mail contacted the White House to request comment on its initial Porter story, the West Wing quickly went into a defensive posture. The story it eventually ran contained statements from Sanders, Kelly, and Orrin Hatch, who professed the integrity of his former chief of staff. But Hatch aides would later tell us that the White House had misled them about what exactly the senator was responding to. The White House called Hatch’s office and told them a story was incoming and that they needed a statement, but they suggested that the story would only recount allegations of verbal abuse—certainly a serious thing, but short of the extremely disturbing wife-beating allegations that ended up in the Mail’s piece.

And that wasn’t all that the White House told them. They assured Hatch that the story was a fictional product of a concerted smear campaign. And at least one of the people behind that smear campaign, the White House claimed, was Corey Lewandowski.

We had already heard, and reported, that Lewandowski was quietly bad-mouthing Porter to friends and allies, and we surmised that it had less to do with his relationship with Porter than with his burning desire to see John Kelly take one on the chin. This whole debacle was turning into a disaster for the chief of staff, and anything that prolonged or deepened the Porter scandal was reflecting directly on Kelly. And the president was taking notice.

We called up Lewandowski to get his reaction to the news out of Hatch’s office. As expected, he was not candid about it. “I’ve never had a bad word about Rob Porter,” he claimed. “I think he did a very good job, and I wish him the very best.” We already knew that he was talking shit behind the scenes. But he appeared to be caught off guard by news that White House officials themselves were fingering him as a culprit behind what they described as a “smear campaign.”

Lewandowski’s surreptitious involvement had an air of tabloid-esque jilted-lover drama in addition to the power politics that pitted him against the chief of staff. Hicks and Lewandowski, who is married, had long been rumored to have carried on a love affair during the 2016 campaign. New York magazine later reported, based on accounts by three sources, that the latter would, long after that relationship ended, try to keep tabs on Hicks’s romantic interests. The Porter debacle, one of those sources said, kicked up plenty of raw emotion.

In January 2018, as the Porter abuse story percolated and prepared to burst into public view, Willoughby, Porter’s second wife, began receiving frantic phone calls from her ex-husband. She had written a blog post on a personal website recounting her abuse at Porter’s hands, and that post was about to cause Porter some major problems. He pleaded with her to remove it. A former colleague, he told her, was out to get him and was threatening to leak the post to the press. Porter didn’t say who

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