His personal lawyer apologizes for own wording about Flynn firing
President Donald Trump said Saturday that he had fired Michael T. Flynn, his first national security adviser, because Flynn had lied not just to the vice president but also to the FBI.
The president has long asserted that he fired Flynn in February because the adviser had lied to Vice President Mike Pence about whether he had talked with the Russian ambassador at the time, Sergey Kislyak, about sanctions imposed on Russia by President Barack Obama.
By saying on Twitter on Saturday that Flynn’s lies to the FBI also had contributed to his firing, Trump prompted some people to suggest he was acknowledging that he had known in February that Flynn was untruthful with the bureau’s agents. Any such admission would be important in light of Trump’s effort that month to persuade the bureau’s director at the time, James Comey, to drop the investigation into Flynn.
But White House officials said Trump was merely acknowledging what had happened the day before: Flynn’s guilty plea for lying to the FBI about his conversations with Kislyak.
Although Trump’s tweet Saturday raised questions about what he knew early this year, he did not actually write it, according to two people briefed on the matter. It was composed by his top personal lawyer, John Dowd, who was in contact with Trump on Friday and Saturday, trying to calm him after Flynn’s guilty plea.
Dowd apologized to White House officials for the tweet, saying he should have been more careful with his language in trying to parrot a statement released Friday by another Trump lawyer, Ty Cobb.
It is not clear that Trump was ever told that the FBI believed Flynn had lied in his interview with agents. Shortly after the acting attorney general, Sally Yates, told the White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II, in January that Flynn might be compromised because he had misled the vice president, McGahn briefed Trump, according to two people familiar with the matter.
McGahn told Trump that it was his impression from Yates that the federal authorities were not pursuing a case against Flynn for lying to the FBI, according to one of the people.
It is unclear whether the president understood this to mean that Flynn had been cleared.
At the time of the firing, White House officials portrayed Flynn as a renegade who had acted independently in his discussions with Kislyak.
But emails among top transition officials, provided or described to The New York Times, suggest that Flynn was far from a rogue actor. In fact, the emails, coupled with interviews and court documents filed Friday, showed that Flynn was in close touch with other senior members of the Trump transition team both
before and after he spoke with Kislyak.
Although Trump has disparaged as a Democratic “hoax” claims that he or his aides had unusual interactions with Russian officials, the records suggest that the Trump transition team was intensely focused on improving relations with Moscow and was willing to intervene to pursue that goal despite a request from the Obama administration that it not sow confusion about official U.S. policy before Trump took office.
On Dec. 29, a transition adviser to Trump, K.T. McFarland, wrote in an email to a colleague that sanctions announced hours before by the Obama administration in retaliation for Russian election meddling were aimed at discrediting Trump’s victory. The sanctions could also make it much harder for Trump to ease tensions with Russia, “which has just thrown the USA election to him,” she wrote in the emails obtained by The Times.
It is not clear whether
McFarland was saying she believed that the election had in fact been thrown. A White House lawyer said Friday that she meant only that Democrats were portraying it that way.
But it is evident from the emails — which were obtained from someone who had access to transitionteam communications
— that after learning that President Barack Obama would expel 35 Russian diplomats, the Trump team quickly strategized about how to reassure Russia. The Trump advisers feared that a cycle of retaliation between the United States and Russia would keep the spotlight on Moscow’s election meddling, tarnishing Trump’s victory and potentially hobbling his presidency from the start.
As part of the outreach, McFarland wrote, Flynn would be speaking with Kislyak hours after Obama’s sanctions were announced.
“Key will be Russia’s response over the next few days,” McFarland wrote in an email to another transition official, Thomas Bossert, now the president’s homeland security adviser.
In an interview, Ty Cobb,
the White House lawyer handling the Russia inquiry, said there was nothing illegal or unethical about the transition team’s actions. “It would have been political malpractice not to discuss sanctions,” he said, adding that “the presidential transition guide specifically encourages contact with and outreach to foreign dignitaries.”
The only problem, Cobb said, was that Flynn had lied to White House officials and to FBI agents about what he had told the Russian ambassador.
The Trump transition team ignored a pointed request from the Obama administration to avoid sending conflicting signals to foreign officials before the inauguration and to include State Department personnel when contacting them.
Trump and his aides have suggested that his concern about Flynn’s potential legal jeopardy was motivated mainly by the president’s admiration for him.
The new details underscore the possibility that Trump might also have been worried about whether any investigation might reach into the White House.