came under investigation in july 2016, the thing that got all this started before robert mueller was even appointed. we still don t know why that is, other than we know he travelled to russia for that dinner and was paid for it and sat next to vladimir putin back in 2015. so michael flynn was present throughout the campaign in key meetings where the trump team was outreaching with the russians. he was talking to the russian ambassador. he was with jared kushner in meeting with the russian ambassador. they tried to set up a back channel, kushner proposed it, through the russian embassy so that kushner says flynn could negotiate with the russians over syria. so he was carrying out a foreign policy before they took office of reproachment with the russians. the question we don t know is whether he was aware of any interactions over russian campaign interference, over hacked e-mails, over this social media manipulation we ve been hearing so much about in recent days. it stands to reason, ka
but that we don t have any reason to want to walk that back. very quickly about michael flynn. he s cooperated with the special counsel s offense and met with them 19 times. is there a particular reason the president has not said he s a rat the way that he s said michael cohen is a rat? look, we know michael cohen to be a liar on a number of fronts, and the president s opinion is extremely clear on that front. i deon t see any reason to go beyond that comment at this point? two questions for you on the government shutdown. first, can you clarify us the current white house position towards the continuing resolution that s floating up on the hill? is it a demand for $1.6 billion in border wall funding, or is it supporting continuing resolution to take this matter up after the christmas break? at this point, the senate s thrown out a lot of ideas. we re disappointed in the fact they have yet to vote on something and pass something. when they do that, we ll make a
determination on whether or not we re going to sign that. in the meantime, we re looking at every avenue available to us possible. the president has asked every one of his cabinet secretaries to look for funding that can be used to protect our borders and to give the president the ability to fulfill his constitutional obligation to protect the american people by having a secure border. so we re looking at the other options. in the meantime, we ll see what the senate does and let you know when we have an announcement on that front. second question sorry, i m going to keep moving just because we re tight on time. following up on that, there s other sources that could potentially pay for the wall. which agencies are you looking at? the president has asked every agency to look and see if they have money that can be used we re going to go back to sarah sanders on more questions on michael flynn. ken, she s standing by her comments saying the fbi ambushed michael flynn. michael
he s told the special counsel about it. a darker explanation, though, for why donald trump seems so confident that flynn can t hurt him and why he s saying nice things about mike flynn, is that flynn isn t incriminating trump, and trump has somehow heard about that, perhaps from his attorney general matthew whitaker, who after all is in a position to be briefed on the details of this investigation. we don t know if he has, but that is one possibility that s out there. is there a joint defense agreement between flynn s attorneys and the president s attorneys as we saw with paul manafort? has that been ruled out? i m sorry. i didn t hear your question. a joint defense agreement between flynn s attorneys and the president s attorneys, the way we saw with manafort s attorneys and the president s attorneys? has that been ruled out? it functionally has been ruled out because they don t have a common interest. and that was true with manafort, too, which is why there s some confusion a
he led chants of lock her up. he was called the donald trump whisperer. those two men had a very close relationship, and had a lot of influence over donald trump s policies and what he would say about foreign relations while they were on the campaign trail. he was not one of those who was telling donald trump to back off bear hugging russia, back off bear hugging vladimir putin. he was not doing that. so yeah, we ll see what he had to offer the special counsel. you have one more? one quick one. remember, this is the obstruction investigation. it s trump trying to put a quash on the investigation of flynn that leads to the whole obstruction issue. that suggests trump is afraid of it. we will see. gentlemen, thank you so much for sticking around. ken, i hope it s not too cold out there. still to come, we have much more on michael flynn, including the curious case of the president s support. we ve been talking about that. we re going to get into the political aspect of that in a