White House press secretary Sean Spicer defended President Donald Trump's handling of the dismissal of former national security adviser Michael Flynn, taking aim at then-acting Attorney General Sally Yates in the process.
The first warning came from President Obama to President-elect Donald Trump on November 10, that is, 48 hours from his election and during their first meeting.
Flynn remained on the job, sitting in on highly classified sessions including a phone call between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Trump fired Flynn, a retired general, for failing to disclose discussions with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak about United States sanctions against Moscow and for not telling the truth about them to Vice President Pence. "Flynn must have known that the Russian ambassador's telephone is under NSA surveillance and so it is weird to the extreme that he would risk breaking the law in public, so to speak".
"The Russians also knew about what Gen. Flynn had done, and the Russians also knew that Gen. Flynn had misled the vice president and others", Yates said.
But the tweet Trump sent, and then highlighted in his banner, put words in Clapper's mouth that Clapper never said - that "no evidence" exists of collusion between Russian Federation and the Trump campaign.
Republican senators in the hearing repeatedly pressed Yates on an unrelated matter - her refusal to defend the Trump administration's travel ban - and whether she was responsible for leaking classified information. Flynn had denied discussing lifting sanctions against Moscow with Kislyak while Barack Obama was still president. Apparently Trump believed that Obama commented about it "in jest".
Yates filled in new details of the events of January 26, describing contacting McGahn in the morning and telling him she had something sensitive to discuss in person.
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We're left with circumstances that sound like the plot of a weird political novel: the president's National Security Advisor was compromised by a foreign adversary that had helped put the president in office, and when the Justice Department alerted the White House to the problem, the president and his team did nothing for weeks, choosing instead to continue to provide him access to some of the nation's most sensitive secrets.
Flynn's forced resignation followed media reports that he had discussed US -imposed sanctions on Russian Federation with Ambassador Kislyak, which was contrary to the public representations of the Trump White House.
Yates said Trump's travel ban, which targeted several Muslim-majority counties, was "unlawful", and added, "All arguments have to be based on truth". I added, "Retired officers of the USA military, inasmuch as they are subject to recall to service, are considered to be a "person holding any office of profit or trust" under the United States".
Separately Monday, former Obama officials said that Obama had raised general concerns about Flynn with Trump and had told the incoming president there were better people for the national security post. "He stands by it", Spicer said. Flynn served under Obama as defense intelligence chief before Obama dismissed him from that post.
Trump has said he has no ties to Russian Federation and isn't aware of any involvement by his aides in Moscow's interference in the election. The White House fired him in February after concluding he had not been truthful about those conversations.
Trump took to Twitter on Monday after a Senate hearing on the subject, saying, "The Russia-Trump collusion story is a total hoax, when will this taxpayer funded charade end?" President Obama himself that month told one of his closest advisers that the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which by then had been investigating Trump associates' possible ties to Russian Federation for about six months, seemed particularly focused on Flynn. The revelation came after interviews with a host of former USA officials, most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to discuss sensitive national security information.
The former acting attorney general said that she walked McGahn through Flynn's conduct in two meetings, on January 26 and again on January 27.
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