How the White House explains waiting 18 days to fire Flynn
WASHINGTON — The question has lingered for weeks: Once President Donald Trump knew Michael Flynn, his national security adviser, had lied to his colleagues and was vulnerable to blackmail by Russians, why didn’t he fire him immediately?
Monday’s dramatic testimony by Sally Yates, the acting attorney general at the time, only added to the mystery.
Like an episode from “House of Cards,” she described rushing on Jan. 26 to warn the new White House counsel that Flynn could be compromised because Moscow knew he was lying, publicly and privately, about his contacts with Russian officials.
Trump waited 18 days, until Feb. 13, to fire Flynn — after The Washington Post reported the warnings the White House had received.
Sean Spicer, White House press secretary, refused to “re-litigate” the delay during his daily briefing Monday. But here are the various explanations he and other administration officials have given in the past.
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A day after Flynn was fired, Spicer spent most of his daily briefing responding to questions about the 18-day delay. He described the warning from Yates as a “heads-up” and repeatedly said the information she provided had been quickly relayed to the president.
“Immediately after the Department of Justice notified the White House counsel of the situation, the White House counsel briefed the president and a small group of his senior advisers.”
But Spicer added that Trump had doubts, believing Flynn had done nothing wrong and ordering a review of the situation.
“He instinctively thought that Gen. Flynn did not do anything wrong, and the White House counsel’s review corroborated that.”
“The president asked them to commit a review of whether there was a legal situation there. That was immediately determined there wasn’t.”
On the question of why the president had not acted sooner, Spicer suggested that doing so would have violated Flynn’s right to due process.
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Two days after Spicer’s comments, the president was asked about Flynn during a 77-minute news conference in the East Room of the White House. Trump called Flynn “a fine person” but said he was “not happy” with the way his former national security adviser had provided information to Vice President Mike Pence.
“You know, he was just doing his job. The thing is, he didn’t tell our vice president properly, and then he said he didn’t remember. So either way, it wasn’t very satisfactory to me.”
The president did not directly address the delay in firing Flynn, and instead repeatedly mentioned his concerns about the leaking of classified information to reporters in the room.
“The first thing I thought of when I heard about it is, how does the press get this information that’s classified? How do they do it? You know why? Because it’s an illegal process, and the press should be ashamed of themselves.”
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Reince Priebus, the White House chief of staff, was asked directly about the 18-day delay on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that Sunday. He described the message from Yates as a “headsup” about Flynn that “something wasn’t adding up with his story.”
“The fact was, it turned more or less into a conversation about whether or not he was being honest with us and the vice president. And the president asked for his resignation, and we got it.”
Priebus described that conversation inside the West Wing as a kind of slowmotion evolution in the thinking of White House officials, who waited for a review of the situation from the counsel’s office.
“And then, some time after that, the legal department came back and said that they didn’t see anything wrong with what was actually said. But then we started thinking about whether or not Michael Flynn was being straight with us. And that’s when we started asking a lot of questions and sort of deposing Michael Flynn, and figuring out what he knew or what he didn’t know.”