team and he said in march and he s saying now that he s still standing by his statement that he had no idea that he was under investigation. where right. where is he on this? i believe we have the sound bite from what he said in march. correct me if i m wrong. yes, we do. okay. let s play it. former national security adviser michael flynn has filed with the department of justice as a foreign agent for making more than $500,000 as a lobbyist, essentially, for turkey. your reaction to that? let me say, hearing that story today was the first i ve heard of it. and i fully support the decision that president trump made asking for general flynn s resignation. you were disappointed by the story? the first i heard of it and i think it is an affirmation of the president s decision to ask general flynn to resign. he says he had no idea.
right. an aide to vice president pence told me today that he stands by those comments that you just heard, that he first heard the news in that interview about general flynn and his ties to turkey. so that begs the question so he s basically claiming ignorance. right. if he were a normal vice president, okay, he didn t know about it. but he was head of the transition. and the report by the new york times is that general flynn they knew. informed the transition. now, the report says that he informed the counsel who is now the white house counsel but the counsel to the transition, don mcgahn. so the open question now is, if that happened, did don mcgahn just sit on it? and, if so, why? why would he do that? because the whole idea, the whole reason why these kinds of ties are inappropriate and are
done. you know, michael, we were talking i was working the morning show. a lot of people are bringing up whitewater, how it started as an investigation into an arkansas land purchase and evolved into the monica lewinsky scandal, how it sort of mushroomed. might that be one of the reasons that the president is tweeting the way he is? absolutely. i think at this point bob could ask for tax returns, e-mails, business information, different financials. but the investigation has a chance to go another way and that is this whole thing with mike pence claiming he didn t know anything about mike flynn and clearly today we ve got a story out saying that the transition was told about mike flynn s investigation. we have the vice president, soon to be vice president at the time who was in charge of the transition and either we got to believe that mike pence was just totally in the dark or we re left to believe that he will now say anything to support this
operative. barbara, you bring up a great point. i saw a note from you, you ve been talking to a senior defense official who is saying that essentially this decision regarding the syrian kurds may have been in the works for a while. well, i think it goes to the point that there s a lot of nuance here, a lot of complicated events but with the bottom line that investigators may be looking at was michael flynn s motivation for whatever he might have done. let s start at the beginning. michael flynn was getting money from sources, elements, companies, officials, whatever in turkey. turkey was objecting to how the obama administration at the time was carrying out the campaign against isis just over the border in syria and iraq. turkey, which it hired michael flynn, was objecting to two things specifically. arming the kurds that the u.s. backed in the fight against isis and the obama administration plan to retake the syrian city
actually right now the house republican conference meeting behind closed doors to discuss health care issues and other matters. but of course this issue of russia continues to dominate the intelligence committee, including devin nunes. there has been a lot of questions since those reports surfaced last week about white house officials, presumably helping mr. nunes access that conversation that surveillance information on white house grounds and he had said previously to our own wolf blitzer that no one in the west wing was aware of his appearance on white house grounds. he also told house speaker paul line, this was a whistle blower. i tried to ask him that on his way into this conference meeting. he wouldn t really answer. what do you think of this idea of giving flynn immunity? can you stop for a second? no. i ve got to get into the what do you think of this