president now and when did he know it, so can you tell us what evidence the white house counsel office had and what did the president know about all of this and when was he aware? press secretary spicer: i mentioned the first day the department of justice made white house counsel available sought to notify west january 25th. the president was immediately informed of the situation. as i said based on the information provided at the time, his view was this was not a violation. he was proved instinctively correct, and white house counsel at the time undertook an extensive review, both of materials and questioning i m not going to get into specifics. what i will tell you is on multiple occasions, they had an exhaustive and extensive questioning of general flynn on several communications based on information provided to them and materials provided to them to review. i m not going to get into the details of that, but i would just say there was an exhaustive review. again, the thing that
at the same time, he fully expects to and wants to be able to get along with russia. unlike previous administrations so that we can solve many problems together facing the world such as the threat of isis and terrorism. the president is currently evaluating a group of very strong candidates that will be considered to fill the national security advisor position permanently and is confident in the ability of general kellogg, a decorated and distinguished veteran of the united states army until that person is ultimately chosen. before i get into the president s schedule for today, quick recap of the president s activity over the last few days since we have not had the honor of sharing so much time together. the president has been keeping a close eye on the orville dam situation in california. we work closely with the man rep is ending that first district where dam is located and other state officials to help people who have been affected. the situation is a textbook example of why we need
you looking at? i cannot comment on all the tools but let me reinforce that sanctions are very important tool within the department, and we will use them as appropriate. in this case, we did freeze assets. again as i mentioned, tens of millions of dollars of assets, in that will have a very big impact on this. i will take one more question. yes, in the back. reporter: during the campaign, the president had made comments about janet yellen and basically if she was being too political, she should be ashamed of herself with the treasury department, so do they feel confident with her at the helm now, to be able to set monetary policy going forward? let me comment that i am really here today to talk about the venezuelan situation, but let me just say there is a tradition of the secretary of treasury having ongoing meetings with the head of the federal
the issue here with this is the president got to the point where general flynn s relationship misleading the vice president and others or the possibility he had forgotten critical details of this important conversation had created a critical mass and an unsustainable situation. that is why the president decided to ask for his resignation, and he got it. the irony of this entire situation is that the president has been incredibly tough on russia. he continues to raise the issue of crimea which the prison to be my previous initiation allowed to be seized by russia. his ambassador to the united nations nikki haley stood before the u.n. security council on her first day and strongly denounced the russian occupation of crimea. as ambassador s nikki haley said at the time the dire situation in eastern ukraine is one that demands clear and strong condemnation of russian actions. president trump has made it very clear he expects the russian government to de-escalate violence in the ukraine a
press secretary spicer: that assumes a lot of things that are not true. the president was informed of this, ask the white house counsel to review the situation. the first matter was whether there was a legal issue. we had to review whether there was a legal issue which the white house counsel concluded there was not. as i stated in my comments, this was an act of trust. whether or not he actually misled the vice president was the issue. that was ultimately what led to the president asking for and accepting the resignation of general flynn. that is it, pure and simple, matter of trust. we went through a very deliberative process, very thorough review, the first part of it was clearly to understand the legal aspect of this. that was simply concluded peer there was no legal aspect, then what happens is the president evaluated the trust aspect. reporter: when the president was asked on air force one on friday traveling down to mar-a-lago about conversations with the russians about sanc