Mr. Kelly, President Trump’s chief of staff, backed up the F. B. I. director’s statement that information about Mr. Porter had been delivered to the White House last March.
Mr. Kelly also said that Donald F. McGahn II, the White House counsel, had been unaware of an issue with Mr. Porter’s background investigation, even though Mr. Porter had mentioned to Mr. McGahn in January 2017 that he was worried that his former wives had damaging information against him. (That month, his first wife, Colbie Holderness, sent an F. B. I. agent a set of photographs that showed her with a black eye that she said Mr. Porter had given her.)
Mr. Kelly did not say what was in the initial cache of information sent by the F. B. I. last March, or what the bureau sent in subsequent bundles in July and November, delivered after the White House had requested follow-up information on the investigation into Mr. Porter.
In the days after Mr. Porter’s resignation, multiple people familiar with the situation said top officials, including Mr. McGahn, Mr. Kelly and Joe Hagin, the deputy chief of staff, had learned in November that there were problems with Mr. Porter’s background investigation.
But Mr. Kelly said that he had not personally known about accusations against Mr. Porter until the afternoon of Feb. 6. Over a few hours that day, Mr. Kelly said, he had issued a statement in strong support of Mr. Porter after Mr. Porter’s second former wife, Jennifer Willoughby, accused him of abuse. Mr. Kelly said that Ms. Willoughby had “made no mention of any type of physical abuse.”
On Friday, Ms. Willoughby said that Mr. Kelly’s comments “added to my opinions of how poorly the White House has handled the situation for weeks,” and questioned why her account was not enough for Mr. Kelly to fire Mr. Porter.
“He didn’t feel Rob should resign until he was accused of physical abuse. That is disturbing,” she said in an email, adding: “I had filed a protective order and called the police on several occasions and I detailed being pulled naked from the shower. That Gen. Kelly does not consider that ‘abuse’ is terrifying to me.”
Mr. Porter offered to resign on Feb. 6, but how seriously Mr. Kelly took Mr. Porter’s initial offer remains unclear. Mr. Kelly said he then departed to Capitol Hill for a meeting on the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program — “Where did that go?” he joked on Friday — but by the time he returned, Ms. Holderness had come forward with accusations of physical abuse. Mr. Kelly said that he then accepted Mr. Porter’s resignation, emphasizing that was before he had seen the photos of Ms. Holderness’s black eye. “No pictures, by the way,” he told reporters.
On Friday, current and former White House officials disputed the timeline Mr. Kelly gave, and said that Mr. Porter was never outright fired, as Mr. Kelly has privately suggested.
Mr. Kelly’s timeline still does not explain why Mr. Porter returned to the White House the next day, or why the White House said the next day that Mr. Porter would remain on staff for a time before leaving. But Mr. Kelly said he would take the blame.
“I should have collected everyone that works here,” Mr. Kelly said when asked about the fuzziness in the hours after the first report of abuse. “All 1,100 people.”
In the meeting on Friday, Mr. Kelly sought to allay speculation that he had faced pressure to resign over the scandal surrounding Mr. Porter, and denied reports that he had offered to do so.
“I have absolutely nothing to even consider resigning over,” he said.
Mr. Kelly declined to discuss questions that have arisen about security clearances since Mr. Porter resigned. Days ago, Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law and a senior adviser, was stripped of his top-secret security clearance after months of delays in completing his background check.
Mr. Kelly said that he had been the one to bring order to the process over security clearances at the White House when he arrived last summer. He said that about six weeks into the job, he started trying to organize administrative paperwork and saw that background investigations into “a couple of spreadsheets’ worth” of people were still not complete.
“It came to my notice that the kind of things I was used to” in previous jobs, including at the Defense Department, Mr. Kelly said, were not “up to the standards I’d been used to.”
