White House staffer Michael Porter’s alleged abuse and affair with Hope Hicks linked to FBI clearance issues and possible cover‑up

8 MICHAEL WOLFF Porter had, before the age of forty, two bitter ex-wives, at least one of whom he had beaten, and both of whom he had cheated on at talk- of-the-town levels. During a stint as a Senate staffer, the married Porter had an affair with an intern, costing him his job. His girlfriend Samantha Dravis had moved in with Porter in the summer of 2017, while, quite unbeknownst to her, he was seeing Hicks. “I cheated on you because you're not attractive enough,” he later told Dravis. In a potentially criminal break of protocol, Porter had gained access to his raw FBI clearance reports and seen the statements of his ex-wives. His most recent ex-wife had also written a blog about his alleged abuse, which, while it did not name him, clearly fingered him. Concerned about the damaging impact his former wives could have on his security review, he recruited Dravis to help him smooth his relationship with both women. Lewandowski, Hicks’s former boyfriend, caught wind of the Hicks- Porter relationship and began working to expose it; by some reports, he got paparazzi to follow Hicks. Though Porter’s history of abuse was slowly making its way to the surface as a result of the FBI investigation, the Lewandowski campaign against Hicks cut through many other efforts to cover up Porter’s transgressions. Dravis, in the autumn of 2017, heard the Lewandowski-pushed rumors of the Hicks-Porter relationship. After finding Hicks’s number listed under a man’s name in Porter's contacts, Dravis confronted Porter, who promptly threw her out. Moving back in with her parents, she began her own revenge campaign, openly talking about Porter's security clear- ance issues, including to people inside the White House counsel's office, saying he had protection at the highest levels in the White House. Then, along with Lewandowski, Dravis helped leak the details of the Hicks- Porter romance to the Daily Mail, which published a story about it on February 1. But Dravis, joined by Porter's former wives, decided that, outra- geously, he had come out looking good in the Daily Mail account—he was part of a glam power couple! Porter called Dravis to taunt her: “You thought you could get me!” Dravis and his former wives all then publicly revealed their abuse at his hand. His first wife said he kicked and punched her; she even produced a photograph of her black eye. His second wife SIEGE - informed the media that she had filed an emergency protective orc against him. The White House, or at least Kelly—and likely Hicks—had been aw: of many of these claims and, effectively, covered them up. (“You usua have enough competent people for White House positions to weed out t wife beaters, but you couldn't be so choosy in the Trump White House,’ sz one Republican acquaintance of Porter's.) The furor that erupted arou Porter and his troubling gross-guy history not only annoyed Trump “He stinks of bad press”—it further weakened Kelly. On February 7, af both of his former wives gave interviews to CNN, Porter resigned. A publicity-shy Hicks—Donald Trump put a high value on associa’ who did not steal his press opportunities—suddenly found her love | in the glare of intense international press scrutiny. Her affair with the d credited Porter highlighted her own odd relationship with the preside and his family, as well as the haphazard management, interpersonal d: functions, and general lack of political savvy in the Trump court. + + The affair was, curiously, among the least of Hicks’s problems. Indeed, 1 Hicks the Porter scandal became perhaps a better cloud under which leave the administration than what almost everybody in the West Wi assumed was the real cloud. On February 27, a reporter at the Washington insider newsletter Axi Jonathan Swan, a favorite conduit for White House leaks, reported tl Josh Raffel was leaving the White House. In a novel arrangement, Rai had come into the White House in April 2017 as the exclusive spokespers for the president's son-in-law Jared Kushner, and his wife, Ivanka, bypa ing the White House communications team. Raffel, who, like Kushn was a Democrat, had worked for Hiltzik Strategies, the New York pub relations firm that represented Ivanka’s clothing line. Hope Hicks, who had also worked for the Hiltzik firm—perhaps b. known for having long represented the film producer Harvey Weinste caught, in the fall of 2017, in an epochal harassment and abuse scanc and cover-up—had originally had the same role as Raffel but at a higt level: she was the personal spokesperson for the president. In Septemb HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_021128