a look at retired general michael flynn as he walks into the courthouse. evan perez is standing by outside there. evan, dana brought up a good point about the link between james comey and michael flynn and the investigation there. you point out one of the ironies here is that james comey didn t think there was enough to get michael flynn on the issue of lying to the fbi. explain? right. exactly. that s one of the ironies here of the situation, john. this is something we ve said repeatedly which is a decision that the president made to fire jim comey has backfired in so many ways and this is exactly what we re talking about. the team that was doing the investigation of michael flynn had made a decision earlier this year that there wasn t enough evidence to bring charges against him for lying. they had decided that there wasn t enough evidence to show that there was willful intent in the way he answered these questions falsely. you see four lies that the special counsel is charging mic
counsel, the special the lawyer in the white house who was in charge of dealing with the mueller investigation. right. the point they have beening may been making is anything michael flynn could plead guilty to has nothing to do with donald trump. right. you will hear that about this guilty plea today. a false statement to the fbi on january 24th, 2017, does not tell you that the trump campaign or certainly donald trump, did anything untoward with russia during the campaign. it is a discreet crime, it is an individual crime, it is not a conspiracy, and that, i think, is a legitimate point to make on the part of, you know, trump partisans. i think everybody lies is not a very effective argument. everybody does not lie when they are interviewed by the fbi. i assure you of that. want to bring in our chief political correspondent dana bash joins us now. dana, again, we re hearing
russia issue, ty cobb, will be doing that shortly but a few minutes ago a source close to the white house who advises them on the flynn issue told cnn s jim acosta that this was expected, that michael flynn had demonstrated poor judgment and that he was fired for lying to the vice president and so, of course, he would lie to the fbi. so the source saying that michael flynn s charge of lying to the fbi was expected in part because he had demonstrated a willingness to lie elsewhere, particularly to the vice president, something that the white house with was confronted by and ended up firing him for. again, this puts the white house in a tough position because for a long time, they ve been saying this investigation doesn t have anything to do with us because all of the charges up until this point had been before the president was inaugurated. this is different. michael flynn was the national security adviser at the time. he was behaving in an official capacity.
these conversations happened during the transition and he lied about it when he was in his official role. the white house still waiting to hear what they re going to say about that and how they re going to spin it, but this source close to the white house on the flynn issue is saying that they expected it, they thought it was going to be coming. john? abby, stand by for us and let us know if we get more from the white house. again, michael flynn expected to plead guilty within minutes inside that federal courthouse where he just entered. bring back our chief legal analyst jeffrey toobin again. evan perez made an interesting point james comey had believed before that there was not enough information to charge michael flynn on, on the issue of lying to the fbi in those interviews. that was our reporting from before. robert mueller feels differently. how does that, again, color our knowledge or analysis about what s going on today? again maybe mueller is choosing this because it s a con
time period, pre-mueller, that didn t quite understand the significance of what the fbi was looking at and why what they thought might have been innocuous, remember he said i don t remember, was one of the lies is, and i didn t tell him was one of the other lies, those are the sort of lies that papadopolous made, too. it makes me wonder whether others who have been already interviewed, before mueller, have made similar lies about matters which they think nobody knows anything about, i can get away with it. to jeffrey s point of spinning hypotheticals which i m all in favor of, remember, sessions said, i had a conversation with kislyak, but it was of no import, nothing substantive. then kislyak is picked up on an intercept he s saying that conversation actually was of substance and so if sessions, again, hypothetically, were to have been interviewed by the fbi during this pre-mueller period and said it was not substantive,