Trump: Didn’t ask for ending Flynn probe
WASHINGTON: President Donald Trump said on Sunday that he never asked former FBI director James Comey to stop investigating his ex-national security adviser Michael Flynn, issuing a fresh denial amid a shifting timeline on when he may have known that Flynn had lied to the FBI.
Trump said on Twitter before dawn: “I never asked Comey to stop investigating Flynn. Just more Fake News covering another Comey lie!” The president reiterated his version of events after Comey testified before Congress in June that Trump had asked him in a oneon-one meeting if he could see to “letting Flynn go.”
Trump shifted his story on Saturday on why he fired Flynn, lumping in the retired Army lieutenant general’s lies to the FBI along with his untruthfulness with Vice President Mike Pence. The president’s initial explanation was that Flynn had to go because he hadn’t been straight with Pence about contacts with Russian officials.
Lying to the FBI is a crime, and one that Flynn acknowledged on Friday in pleading guilty and agreeing to cooperate with the special counsel’s Russia investigation. Trump tweeted Saturday: “I had to fire General Flynn because he lied to the Vice President and the FBI. He has pled guilty to those lies. It is a shame because his actions during the transition were lawful. There was nothing to hide!”
Amid questions raised by the tweet, Trump associates tried to put distance between the president himself and the tweet. One person familiar with the situation said the tweet was actually crafted by John Dowd, one of the president’s personal attorneys.
The New York Times reported on Saturday that emails among top Trump transition officials suggested that Flynn was in close contact with other senior members of the transition team before and after he spoke to Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. A December 29 email from KT McFarland, a transition adviser to Trump, suggested that Russian sanctions announced by the Obama administration had been aimed at discrediting Trump’s victory.
WRONG NEWS: ABC NEWS SUSPENDS REPORTER
ABC News has suspended investigative reporter Brian Ross for four weeks without pay for his erroneous report on Michael Flynn, which it called a “serious error.”
Ross, citing an unnamed confidant of Flynn, the former national security adviser, had reported that then-candidate Donald Trump had directed Flynn to make contact with the Russians. That would have been an explosive development in the ongoing investigation into whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russia to interfere in the election. But hours later, Ross clarified his report on the evening news, saying that his source now said Trump had done so not as a candidate, but as president-elect.