"....according to three people with knowledge of the incident."
Sources cited by the WaPo for the gossip about Trump and Kelly. Three people with knowledge of the incident. Not necessarily witnesses. They just have "knowledge of" the incident. Could have heard it from others, and it could be second or third hand knowledge. But, that's good enough for a news story to be filled with editorializing about how the President "growled" and such.
Then when Kelly said "i'm outta here" - WaPo says that was a resignation threat, excpet to a "senior administration official" who is also anonymous. To that person, it was Kelly "venting his anger" only.
An unnamed "official" said that Kelly had offended Melania, and nobody is cited for saying that Kelly doesn't "lurk" around the oval office (I guess the reporter thinks Kelly is supposed to "lurk"), and he does not "listen in to the President's calls" to foreign leaders. Oh, no! We have no source for that - reporter just says "trust me."
And, then comes the greatest citation in the article - Leon Panetta! “When you lose that power,” said Leon Panetta, a Democratic former White House chief of staff, “you become a virtual White House intern, being told where to go and what to do.” So, he is in the article not because he knows a damn thing about Kelly, but he can say that when you lose "that power" you are now just an intern. The article hasn't established that Kelly lost any power, and reports what amounts to hearsay gossip by "officials" who we don't know how or why they have this information, or how or why they are leaking the information. I mean "officials" leaking scurrilous reports of the President growling, and howling at his employees, and Kelly leaving a couple of hours early for the day (but, really threatening to resign altogether...)? Come on...
The author knows this is all thin bullshit, because the author then adds this for credibility - "This portrait of Kelly’s trajectory is based on interviews with 16 administration officials, outside advisers and presidential confidants, many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to assess the chief of staff." Well, how many were admin officials, and how many were "outside advisers?" And, since only some of them spoke on condition of anonymity -- why not identify those who did not speak on condition of anonymity? What's going on here? And, this is something that warrants granting anonymity? WaPo says it doesn't just grant anonymity lightly - there has to be a national security issue and some significant risk to the witnesses. What's going on here?
No wonder Trump scoffed at this article. It's bullshit. It tells us nothing. We cannot evaluate a single person who claims to have actual knowledge of the facts reported. The only people actually named are those who couldn't possibly know anything about it.
So, more horseshit political reporting, giving the public no information that can be used to make any political decision. It's just scurrilous gossip about how bad Trump supposedly treats people.
“When I was in college, I took a terrorism class. ... The thing that was interesting in the class was every time the professor said ‘Al Qaeda’ his shoulders went up, But you know, it is that you don’t say ‘America’ with an intensity, you don’t say ‘England’ with the intensity. You don’t say ‘the army’ with the intensity,” she continued. “... But you say these names [Al Qaeda] because you want that word to carry weight. You want it to be something.” - Ilhan Omar