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- Former US National Security Adviser Michael Flynn has pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI, accepting a plea deal.
- His testimony could implicate other senior members of Trump’s Campaign team.
- Trump may have been involved in the obstruction of justice, with potential impeachment repercussions.
Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into the Trump Administration’s ties with Russia heated up on Friday when Michael Flynn, Trump’s former National Security Adviser, pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI.
Flynn served for less than a month and was fired by Trump in mid-February after officials said that he had misled Vice President Mike Pence and other officials about his phone discussions with the then Russian ambassador to the United States, Sergey Kislyak. Flynn spoke to Kislyak by phone several times within late December and supposedly discussed sanctions put in place by the Obama administration. These calls were monitored by US intelligence agencies and, days after Trump took office in January, Flynn was interviewed by FBI agents about those talks. Now, under a plea bargain deal, Flynn has admitted that he willfully and knowingly made materially “false, fictitious and fraudulent” statements to the FBI about these conversations with Kislyak. He has agreed to cooperate with prosecutors delving into the actions of Trump’s inner circle before he took office.
Prosecutors have alleged that Flynn asked Kislyak to help delay a UN vote seen as damaging to Israel under the instructions of a “very senior member” of Trump’s transition team. Flynn could face a maximum sentence of 5 years in prison and a fine of $250,000 for his actions. However, as long as he fully cooperates with the special counsel’s requests, Flynn is likely to face a reduced prison sentence of up to 6 months and a fine of $500-$9,500. The proposed sentencing takes into account the fact that Flynn has no prior criminal record.
Legal experts have highlighted the fact that this vast reduction in potential jail-time and financial reparation signals that Flynn has provided very significant information about at least one other target of the Mueller investigation, potentially Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner. For example, section eight of the deal, entitled “cooperation”, specifies that Flynn’s cooperation with the FBI may include “participating in covert law enforcement activities”. It’s possible then that Flynn was already wearing a wire and recording his conversations with other figures of the Mueller investigation before Friday’s events.
Whilst Friday’s revelations would appear to make a Trump impeachment inevitable, due to his strongly supported weekend tax-cut proposals it’s unlikely that Republicans within Congress will actively seek to impeach him, at least for now. Trump’s bill consists of a $1.5 billion cut to the tax bill, a large cut in corporation tax to 20% from 35%, and exempts future foreign profits of US based firms from tax. Republican Majority leader Mitch McConnell has called the passing of the bill ‘’just what the country needs to get growing again’’. There was also nothing in Friday’s court hearing that pointed to any evidence against Trump, with the White House having said that Flynn’s guilty plea implicated Flynn and Flynn alone.
However, on Saturday Trump tweeted that he had to fire Flynn because he “lied to the Vice President and the FBI”, implying that he had prior knowledge of Flynn breaking the law before
Friday’s revelations. This tweet could signal that Trump took part in the obstruction of justice if he knew that Flynn had lied to the FBI when he asked James Comey, the former Director of the FBI, to stop investigating Flynn.
But, it has since come to light that the tweet was actually written by John Dowd, Trump’s chief lawyer. Dowd is adamant that the first time Trump knew that Flynn had lied to the FBI was when he was charged on Friday, with Dowd having apologised for the tweet misleading people. Democrats and lawyers doubt that Dowd actually wrote the tweet, with Laurence Tribe, a Harvard law professor, saying that anyone who believes Dowd’s alibi for “his corruptly treacherous client is a complete fool.” Regardless, Dowd has said that even if Trump had written the tweet himself, the President of the United States cannot obstruct justice because he is the chief law enforcement officer under Article II of the Constitution and thus “has every right to express his view of any case”.
For now the world eagerly awaits as more details of Flynn’s testimony come to light. The impact that his confession will have on the Trump Administration could be huge.
Written by Natasha Rega-Jones. Edited by Keval Dattani.