‘Trump told me to contact Russians’
Ex-aide set to make sensational election claim
A FORMER top White House aide is set to testify that Donald Trump ordered him to contact Russians when he was running for President, it was claimed last night.
Ex- national security adviser Michael Flynn pleaded guilty yesterday to lying about his Russia connections to the FBI.
The charges were brought as part of a probe into alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 US election.
Mr Flynn is the most senior member of the administration to be indicted. The retired army lieutenant general was part of Mr Trump’s inner circle during his campaign.
But he was sacked from his White House job after less than a month for misleading Vice President Mike Pence about his conversations with a Kremlin diplomat.
US insiders said he felt his former boss and friend Mr Meddling probe: Mr Flynn Trump abandoned him, and now has crippling legal bills.
He faces up to five years in prison for misleading FBI agents about the nature of his conversations with Russian ambassador to the US Sergey Kislyak in the period before Mr Trump took office.
Citing a ‘close confidant’ of Mr Flynn, ABC News said he is ready to testify that Mr Trump told him to make contact with the Russians, initially to work together against IS in Syria. Mr Flynn initially denied discussing US sanctions on Russia, but transcripts of phone calls showed he was lying.
Court papers show he asked Mr Kislyak if the Kremlin could tone down its reaction to new sanctions the US had imposed on Russians.
When Vladimir Putin announced the next day he wouldn’t retaliate, Mr Trump praised him on Twitter.
Moscow has denied accusations by US intelligence agencies that it tried to sway the vote in Mr Trump’s favour. The President has denied any collusion with Russia and the White House has said Mr Flynn has no information that would hurt Mr Trump.
White House lawyer Ty Cobb insisted: ‘Nothing about the guilty plea or the charge implicates anyone other than Mr Flynn.’ But the reports sent the US stock market plunging and the dollar slumped 0.5 per cent against leading global currencies. Mr Flynn, who headed the Defence Intelligence Agency under President Barack Obama, said it had been ‘extraordinarily painful to endure these many months of false accusations’.
However, he accepted he had lied and was now ‘working to set things right’.
Former FBI director James Comey has accused Mr Trump of attempting to persuade him to drop the investigation into Mr Flynn’s conduct.
According to Mr Comey, at a White House meeting in February the President said: ‘He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go.’ The White House has denied the allegation.
Last night, Mr Trump denied reports he was set to sack secretary of state Rex Tillerson, calling them ‘fake news’.
Prisons minister Sam Gyimah has become the first Government frontbencher to speak out publicly against a Trump state visit to Britain.
Following Mr Trump’s retweeting of anti-Muslim posts by a UK far-Right group, Mr Gyimah warned it would be ‘divisive at a time when we are trying to unite our country’.
‘Extraordinarily painful to endure’