Michael Flynn resigns as national security adviser

When the Justice Department announced it would drop charges against former Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, legal experts reacted with a combination of shock and horror.

Flynn not only lied to the FBI about his contacts with the Russian government, which is a crime, but admitted that he had lied in open court. At best, dropping his case is highly unusual; at worst, it’s President Trump corruptly protecting a political ally who broke the law on his behalf.

President Donald Trump fired Michael Flynn as his national security adviser after only 24 days — but based on former FBI Director James Comey’s memos, it’s surprising that didn’t happen sooner.

Comey wrote memos after conversations with Trump in early 2017 in order to keep a written record. In the memos, which media obtained on Thursday night after the Justice Department sent redacted versions to Congress, Comey noted that Trump said he had “serious reservations” about Flynn — in part because he failed to tell Trump about a phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

A bombshell New York Times report suggests that President Donald Trump ordered the White House counsel to try to prevent Attorney General Jeff Sessions from recusing himself from special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation.

The report is the latest indication that the president might have obstructed justice in Mueller’s ongoing probe.

President Donald Trump loves Michael Flynn.

His ardor hasn’t faded despite the fact that the biggest scandals engulfing the Trump administration right now trace back to the disgraced former national security adviser, or that their very closeness has at times growing talk of impeachment. If anything, all of that seems to be making Trump love Flynn even more. This is all the more interesting since Thursday, when the Wall Street Journal reported that a Republican operative who claimed to be working on behalf of Flynn was asking around for stolen Clinton emails during the campaign — which smells a little like a plot to collude with Russian hackers.

Embattled ex-National Security Adviser Michael Flynn is in even more trouble than we thought.

On Monday afternoon, Rep. Elijah Cummings, the ranking Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, published a letter detailing strong evidence that Flynn lied about his contacts with Russia during a 2016 security clearance renewal process — which is a felony.

Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser currently under investigation for his ties to Russian officials, will not be cooperating with the Senate investigation into the 2016 election, the Associated Press reported.

Flynn reportedly plans to plead the Fifth Amendment — the right against self-incrimination — to avoid disclosing documents to the Senate Intelligence Committee, which lawmakers subpoenaed last week.

WASHINGTON — When former acting Attorney General Sally Yates was sworn in before the Senate Subcommittee on Terrorism and Crime on Monday afternoon, nearly everyone sitting near me in the audience sat up to snap a picture. It felt like an iconic moment, one that spoke to the importance of the events about to take place.

This turned out to be right. Yates’s subsequent testimony confirmed, under penalty of perjury, that she had warned the Trump White House that then-National Security Adviser Michael Flynn was lying about his contact with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak in late December. Yates told the White House this on January 26 and again on January 27. She worried that one of the country’s top officials was vulnerable to Russian blackmail.

The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday night that former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn has been seeking an immunity deal from both the FBI and the House and Senate intelligence committees under which he would testify in exchange for immunity from prosecution. Shortly thereafter, Flynn’s attorney, Robert Kelner, released a letter to the press that appeared to confirm the story.

“General Flynn certainly has a story to tell,” according to the letter, “and he very much wants to tell it, should the circumstances permit.”

Former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, who was fired in February after lying about his contacts with the Russian government, has formally registered with the Justice Department as a “foreign agent” and admitted that he had lobbied on behalf of the Turkish government as recently as November 2016.

As the Associated Press reports, Flynn’s lawyer filed paperwork with the Justice Department Tuesday disclosing that the retired Army general had done lobbying work between August and November 2016 that “could be construed to have principally benefited the Republic of Turkey.” According to the filing, Flynn’s company, Flynn Intel Group Inc., was paid at least $530,000 for the work.

President Donald Trump is outraged about the number of intelligence leaks to the press since he took office — seemingly in large part because the news reports forced the White House to fire former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn. His concerns have reached the ears of top congressional investigators.

Rep. Jason Chaffetz, the Republican chair of the House Oversight Committee, and Republican House Judiciary Chair Rep. Bob Goodlatte sent a letter this week to the Department of Justice’s inspector general, Michael Horowitz, requesting an immediate investigation into intelligence leaks.

The White House’s explanation for the resignation of National Security Adviser Michael Flynn was muddled at best — then President Donald Trump weighed in.

On Wednesday at a joint press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and in his first in-person remarks since Flynn’s resignation, Trump said his former adviser is “wonderful man” who had been “treated very very unfairly” by the press.

On Tuesday, seven Republican senators indicated that it’s likely there will be further investigations into the conversations between former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn and the Russian ambassador to the US. Flynn resigned Monday night following reports that the Justice Department briefed the White House last month that Flynn had discussed sanctions with the Russian ambassador before Trump took office.

CNN reports that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has said it is “highly likely” that the Senate Intelligence Committee will look into Flynn’s talks with Ambassador Sergey Kislyak.

Usually, the sudden resignation of a top Cabinet official just 24 days into a presidential administration and after intrigue involving the Russian ambassador would lead to congressional hearings.

But on Tuesday, House Republicans weren’t interested in investigating the resignation of former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn. Rep. Devin Nunes, the chair of the House Intelligence Committee, said his committee wouldn’t be looking into conversations between President Trump and Flynn. Those conversations, Nunes said, would be covered by executive privilege, the president’s right to keep conversations with his advisers secret from Congress and the courts.

There are a lot of questions swirling around the scandal that brought down National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, but the biggest and most important goes way beyond him: What’s up with President Donald Trump and Russia?

Flynn was forced out of his job Monday night amid growing evidence that he’d misled Vice President Mike Pence, and potentially the FBI, about the nature of his conversations with Russian Ambassador to the US Sergey Kislyak. Flynn told Pence he didn’t discuss Washington’s sanctions on Moscow with the envoy, but FBI intercepts showed that he’d done so explicitly and even hinted Trump might lift the measures once he was in the White House.

At Tuesday afternoon’s press briefing, ABC News White House correspondent Jonathan Karl asked White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer if, in the wake of Michael Flynn’s resignation, he could “still say definitively that nobody on the Trump campaign, not even Gen. Flynn, had any contact with the Russians before the election.”

Spicer at first evaded with an answer about the transition, then when Karl pressed him, said no.

The frontrunner to replace fired National Security Adviser Michael Flynn is basically the anti-Flynn.

The Washington Post reports that Vice Adm. Robert Harward, a onetime Navy SEAL and former deputy commander of US Central Command who served under current Secretary of Defense James Mattis, is the leading contender to succeed Flynn.

Monday night, Michael Flynn got fired.

Tuesday afternoon, it became clear that the Trump administration doesn’t have a clear story about why.

On Monday evening, President Trump lost his national security adviser, Michael Flynn, who resigned amid a swarm of questions about whether he misled top White House officials and the FBI over a December phone call with the Russian ambassador to the US. But in the process, Trump may have also suffered another major loss: his best and easiest shot at warming ties with Russia, by lifting sanctions on the country.

The Trump administration has been struck by a hurricane of controversy stemming from Flynn’s resignation, including questions over whether Flynn potentially illegally discussed lifting sanctions on Russia during his communications with the Russian diplomat, and a continuing FBI probe into those communications, which could lead to criminal prosecutions. Additionally, the Army is looking into whether Flynn received money from the Russian government for a trip to Moscow in 2015, which could be a violation of the emoluments clause of the Constitution.

White House counselor Kellyanne Conway joined Matt Lauer on the Today show Tuesday morning to talk about the resignation of National Security Adviser Michael Flynn.

The takeaway from the back and forth: confusion.

More than 12 hours after National Security Adviser Michael Flynn suddenly resigned after news broke that he’d lied to other administration officials about his conversation with the Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, President Donald Trump has stayed uncharacteristically quiet.

His only comment on the resignation thus far was a tweet demanding to know why all of this happened — not Flynn’s downfall, but the leaks that led to it:

House Republicans are not eager to investigate Michael Flynn.

House Oversight Committee Chair Rep. Jason Chaffetz said his committee will not investigate Flynn’s contact with the Russian government, or the extent of his communications with White House officials.

Everybody knows that Donald Trump isn’t conventionally qualified to be president of the United States. But as a candidate, he appealed to people’s distaste for the conventional political system, and a segment of the public had Apprentice-induced faith in his management skills, figuring he would do what any business genius would do — surround himself with talent.

“I am self funding and will hire the best people,” he wrote in April, “not the biggest donors!”

Top Republican investigators on Capitol Hill say they don’t have plans to investigate Michael Flynn’s ties to Russia, or his conversations with President Donald Trump — and Sen. Elizabeth Warren is furious, previewing an attack line Democrats are likely to deploy frequently in the days to come.

“Congress must pull its head out of the sand and launch a real, bipartisan, transparent inquiry into Russia. Our natl security is at stake,” Warren wrote Tuesday in a series of condemning tweets aimed at Trump’s administration after Flynn resigned from his post as national security adviser late Monday night.

Michael Flynn, President Donald Trump’s national security adviser, has resigned just weeks after the new president took office. The resignation came after questions grew over whether Flynn had deliberately lied to Vice President Mike Pence and the FBI over phone calls with a Russian envoy on December 29, which may have violated federal law.

On social media, a few Trump critics were quick to point out the hypocrisy that led Flynn to this moment. During the July 2016 Republican National Convention, in which Trump accepted his nomination to run for president, Flynn joined crowds in chanting, “Lock her up!” in reference to Hillary Clinton, who had been accused of mishandling classified information by using a private email server. As the crowd chanted, Flynn said, “If I did a tenth of what she did, I would be in jail today.” (The FBI concluded that “no reasonable prosecutor” would bring a case against Clinton over the email issue.)

Donald Trump’s presidency didn’t even make it a month before one of his top aides resigned in scandal.

After days of “drip, drip, drip” leaks about just what National Security Adviser Michael Flynn may have said to the Russian ambassador during the transition, Flynn resigned Monday night.