your thoughts, matt? i know mike flynn. he has served his country with honor. he got the chance to have one of the most significant posts in government and it seems very apparent that he had some lapses in judgment. he should be held accountable. but i m sure that in this process people will take into account his great service. the one thing that i keep thinking about, sandra, as i m listening to your coverage, is it s important to remember that general flynn was fired by president obama because he did have a different view on foreign policy and he was pushing hillary clinton and barack obama in the foreign policy team of the obama administration to really confront radical islamic terrorism and he became a nuisance to them and they got rid of him. there is something else i think in bill s tick tok we have to remember. when president obama met with president trump he said not to put mike flynn on his team. there was a personal animosity between barack obama and mike flynn and the next
so he is on the schedule. bill: a lot moving. sandra: as the president said, he is here. bill: it s 10:16. we re 14 minutes away from seeing general flynn enter that courthouse. back in a moment here as our coverage continues on america s newsroom.
early administrations before policies are released. now, clearly in fairness to the other side, there is a lot of interactions here with russians. a surprising degree. and i think people want to know the truth about all of this. whether we ll get more of this. bill: that s a very interesting answer. you have to think about how the trump policy may have been different from the obama policy as it relates to russia. general flynn was a man who went to the white house who believed if you can peel moscow away from beijing you can make the pivot to asia much easier. we can argue the merits of whether or not it was a good policy and whether or not something that is ultimately something that would work. but that was the mentality that people like general flynn brought to this job, sir. i think you re right. and he was he did have a lot of expertise in this area. i think that what you really see in these types of criminal charges is something that s all
house reaction may shake out. you remember let s go back to early february. this is the stuff that michael flynn was fired for by the white house, not disclosing conversations that he had had with the russian ambassador. keeping that to himself and maybe lying to the white house about it. the vice president mike pence went out there on a sunday morning show and said there had been no conversations with the russians and it turns out low and behold that there had. that really was the trigger for flynn s firing. so i think the white house would probably say there is nothing about this that s inconsistent with anything that s happened before. you can t lie to the f.b.i. when they are asking you questions. and it appears, too, that you cannot lie to the president of the united states or the vice president or his intermediaries, if you do and it gets them in hot water you ll lose your job as well. in terms of exactly how they are going to respond to this,
russian ambassador telling him that russia had chosen to moderate its response to those as a result of his request. if i could ask you to shed light on the two items here. we want to see what happens in court in an hour s time. but again, my read of this based on my experience covering this area is that flynn told investigators that he did not ask the government of russia s ambassador to put a lid on any kind of escalation after the sanctions but in fact there are telephone intercepts that show that he said the opposite. so that would be the way to show that what was said to investigators is uncut by the actual conversation. remember at that time december 29th, flynn is outside the country with his wife on vacation. and the question again has been whether those conversations were picked up because there was a surveillance warrant specific to flynn or whether they were picked up as a result of surveillance on the russian ambassador and flynn was unmasked. sandra: the second line ite