Chief of staff John Kelly intervened after a senior official, Cliff Sims, got the president to sign a ball for the Alabama governor during the Crimson Tide’s White House visit. (ABOVE) President Donald Trump talks with Alabama head coach Nick Saban as he looks at a football he received from the 2017 NCAA national champion University of Alabama football team during an event on the South Lawn of the White House on April 10.
When Cliff Sims cleared out his desk in the White House press office earlier this month, his colleagues immediately thought of the football incident — an odd and ultimately trivial episode that nonetheless attracted the attention and frustration of the chief of staff.
In April, when President Donald Trump invited members of the University of Alabama football team to the White House to celebrate their national championship win, Sims—an Alabama grad—surprised his colleagues by popping unannounced into the Oval Office, pigskin in hand, as Trump was posing for pictures with head coach Nick Saban and others.
Sims, whose title was special assistant to the president and director of White House message strategy, explained that he needed to get the ball signed as a gift for Republican Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey, at the request of the university. Sims dropped the ball off with another White House staffer and left the room.
Trump signed the ball.
But that’s where things seem to have gotten off track.
Sims told colleagues he had received sign-off from the White House counsel’s office to have the ball signed and gifted to the Alabama state house, and never handled the ball again after dropping it off. Other staffers said they saw it in Sims’ office after the team left the White House campus. Either way, the ball eventually ended up on John Kelly’s desk, and the frustrated White House chief of staff summoned Sims into his office to ask him what the heck was going on with his unexpected presence in the Oval Office, and a signed football floating around the White House. Sims declined to comment.
But the football incident illustrates how “Veep”-levels of clumsiness in the Trump White House reach all the way to the top of the chain of command — and underscores how, almost a year into his tenure as chief of staff, Kelly is still struggling to maintain order, acting at times more like a middle school principal than a Cabinet-level executive.
But Norm Eisen, who served as ethics czar under President Barack Obama, said there is a formal protocol for any piece of memorabilia entering the Oval Office to be signed — at least there used to be.
“People are restricted from what they can bring into the Oval,” he said. “In previous administrations, you would have had to go through the director of Oval Office operations to make arrangements for memorabilia to be signed. The office of the most powerful man in the world is not supposed to look like the memorabilia line at the baseball trading card show.”
But just a month after the football incident, Sims is now gone from the West Wing. POLITICO reported last week that he had accepted a position as an adviser to Mike Pompeo, with whom he bonded when he helped with Pompeo’s recent confirmation as secretary of state. A White House spokesperson would not confirm Sims’ new position.
The Alabama governor’s office did not respond to a request for comment as to whether it had ever received the signed football that was accidentally — or not — left behind after the ceremony. Ivey is an Auburn University graduate and fan, though she is listed as the president of both the University of Alabama and the Auburn boards of trustees.
A mystery endures: what became of the football. The piece of Crimson Tide memorabilia, according to two people familiar with the episode, may still be floating around somewhere in the White House.