his candidacy. he could not get people of stature to stand with him, to endorse him, to campaign with him. enter general flynn, a decorated military intelligence officer who would go around the country with donald trump at these campaign events and defend the trump agenda, defend president trump, attack hillary clinton, and give him some credibility that he longed for, that trump longed for. michael allen that, sets us up for the conversation about michael flynn s extraordinary fall from grace. phil points out what a disclosure rated military veteran he was. joined the army in 1981, deployed to iraq, let the intelligence team, who found and killed a leading terrorist. obviously he was leading intelligence agencies throughout the early 2000s. the new yorker has a piece about this, talking about how a senior military intelligence official said this story is bigger than mike flynn. who told mike to do this? i think somebody said, mike, you got some contacts, let them know it s going t
flynn go. and so i do think it is reasonable to assume that he s got some, you know, serious anxiety about what michael flynn could do to him. that said, you know, i don t pretend to have insight into those communications, and i think we re really just going to have to wait until those big redacted paragraphs in the flynn sentencing memo get replaced by something more tangible. phil, you ve been covering this white house and this president as long as i have. you probably remember some of what the president has said about mike flynn. to help refresh our viewers memories, here s a little bit of that, druonald trump over the years talking about this guy. did you direct mike flynn to discuss sanctions with the russian ambassador no, i didn t. prior to your inauguration? no, i didn t. did you fire him because information leaked out? i fired him because of what he said to mike pence, very
video of michael flynn moments ago arriving at the federal court in washington. a little further down from where ken is standing right now. you can see folks outside. we know flynn is inside at this point. the sentencing is supposed to go down within about 58 minutes from now, at the top of the hour, 11:00 eastern. and you know somebody who s watching this. he s in the white house residence. president donald trump, who is tweeting about mike flynn this morning. jeff bennett is at the white house with that for us. jeff, what s going on? reporter: well, the president this morning wished good luck to michael flynn, his disgraced former national security adviser, who could be sentenced for a federal crime at any minute now. so here s the tweet the president sent. he says, good luck today in court to general michael flynn. will be interesting to see what he has to say despite tremendous pressure being put on him about russian collusion in our great and obviously highly successful politica
deal because he said they were embarrassed by the way he was treated. the president also said the mueller team attempted to scare flynn into making up stories. but here s the thing. we don t know why mike flynn lied. we don t know whether anyone, including president trump, directed him to do it. and if trump did play a role in this, is that why the president is treating mike flynn with kid gloves? and is that why the president asked james comey, the former fbi director, to let the flynn investigation go? that is the big question that a lot of us have right now. why has trump, a man for whom loyalty is so often a one-way street, why is he so apparently eager to defend mike flynn? michael flynn, just like michael cohen, is cooperating with prosecutors. yet trump called michael cohen a rat. so it s unclear what threat this poses to president trump. for now, we ve seen the way the president is trying to turn this flynn case into a political cause to energize his base by speculating that mi
flynn. there was a lot of concern among trump s allies a few weeks ago when the mueller team disclosed that flynn had 19 separate meetings with investigators, with prosecutors. people don t quite know what exactly it is he might have shared with robert mueller and if any of that information could somehow implicate the president or his campaign team. so i think everyone s sort of waiting to see what flynn is going to say in court and whether there could be any political damage for the president, if not, any legal damage of some kind. let s talk about that legal damage, barbara. there is that question, that big question related to why did mike flynn lie? it s not illegal. it s not against the law, right, to have conversations during a transition with another official. the russian ambassador, in this case. so why did flynn lie about it? lies are a very significant red flag for investigators because they suggest that the person has what s known as a consciousness of guilt. they know th