WASHINGTON: Barack
Obama warned his soon to be successor Donald
Trump against hiring Michael
Flynn as his national security advisor, a former administration official told AFP on Monday.
As President
Trump sought to blame the
Obama administration for missing Flynn’s links with Russian contacts, the former administration revealed that
Obama warned Trump personally about the embattled retired general.
Flynn lasted just 24 days as national security adviser before being fired by
Trump for **t telling the truth about contacts he had had with Russia’s ambassador to Washington.
Obama hired, and fired,
Flynn as the head of the Defence Intelligence Agency.
Obama
warned Trump about Flynn’s conduct during a first meeting in the Oval ******, a warning "based on Flynn’s role as head of DIA," a former administration official said.
Despite that message,
Trump hired
Flynn to the high profile job of national security adviser -- the president’s top foreign and security policy aide -- before firing him for misleading the administration about his contacts with Russia.
Later on Monday, former acting attorney general Sally Yates is expected to tell a Senate inquiry that she also explicitly
warned Trump’s team in January that
Flynn could be compromised by once-concealed communications with Russia’s US ambassador.
Trump, who fired Yates soon after taking ******, fired off a ****** of pre-emptive strikes ahead of her appearance on Capitol Hill, accusing
Obama of enabling
Flynn and assailing Yates for allegedly leaking classified information.
"General
Flynn was given the highest security clearance by the
Obama Administration,"
Trump tweeted early Monday.
"Ask Sally Yates, under oath, if she k**ws how classified information got into the newspapers soon after she explained it to W.H. Counsel," he added, apparently referring to the counsel’s ******, an in-house legal team.
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