Obama warned Trump about Flynn, officials say

The White House, however, continues to blame Obama for not revoking Flynn's security clearance.

Former President Barack Obama warned then-President-elect Donald Trump about Michael Flynn during their Oval Office meeting two days after the election, current and former administration officials confirmed.

Obama and his staff felt Flynn was problematic and prone to what they thought of as crazy ideas, and had fired him from his job as head of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Obama relayed that to Trump during the 90 minutes they spent together.

Obama hadn’t planned to spend time in the meeting criticizing Flynn, but it came up as part of the conversation when the topic of personnel came up, according to a former Obama administration official. Accounts differ on how extensive he got, with one person familiar with the meeting saying that Obama forcefully told Trump to steer clear of Flynn.

This seemed to momentarily give Trump pause, the former Obama administration official said.

Some on the transition team, including New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, lobbied against hiring Flynn, said the person familiar with the meeting. But Trump, always one to value loyalty, decided to stick with the man who had campaigned for him so hard.

Flynn was an integral part of the Trump campaign and was already by then receiving intelligence briefings as a Trump designee, and was on track to be named national security adviser, which he was ultimately named to. He was fired in February after it was revealed he misled Vice President Mike Pence and others about his conversations with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak.

He’s now at the center of investigations about the Trump orbit’s ties to Russia and his own failure to disclose foreign financial ties and relationship. NBC News first reported Obama's warnings to Trump about Flynn.

Trump and other White House aides have tried to shift the responsibility for his rocky tenure to Obama. “General Flynn was given the highest security clearance by the Obama Administration - but the Fake News seldom likes talking about that,” Trump tweeted Monday morning.

White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer acknowledged on Monday that Obama criticized Flynn in his conversation with Trump last year, but tried to downplay his concerns, describing the former president as not a "fan" of Flynn.

"It's true that President Obama made it known that he wasn't exactly a fan of General Flynn's," Spicer told reporters at the afternoon briefing, "which frankly shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone, given that General Flynn had worked for President Obama, was an outspoken critic of President Obama's shortcomings."

Spicer then tried to cast doubt on the validity of Obama's questions about Flynn by asking why he had not revoked his security clearance, using the same argument to dismiss questions about whether Flynn had been truthful in all his answers on government forms.

"I'm not going to get into those details," Spicer said. "That was something adjudicated by the Obama administration in April of 2016. They took no steps to suspend that, so that's not really a question for us. It's a question for them at that time."

As Flynn has come under scrutiny in recent weeks, the White House has repeatedly deflected criticism of its vetting process by noting that the Obama administration had vetted the former national security adviser, as well.

Obama's office declined comment on the conversation with Trump.

Sally Yates, the Obama administration official who was acting attorney general in the first days of the Trump administration, before the president fired her, is scheduled to testify before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism on Monday afternoon. She had raised concerns about Flynn's contact with the Russian ambassador early on to the Trump White House.



[POLITICO]