US President Donald Trump’s embattled national security adviser Michael Flynn resigned following reports he misled US Vice President Mike Pence and other officials about his contacts with Russia.
His departure upends Trump’s senior team after less than a month in office.
In a resignation letter, Flynn said he gave Pence and others “incomplete information” about his calls with the Russian ambassador to the US.
Photo: AFP
The vice president, apparently relying on information from Flynn, initially said the national security adviser had not discussed sanctions with the Russian envoy, though Flynn later conceded the issue might have come up.
Trump named retired Lieutenant General Keith Kellogg as acting national security adviser. Kellogg had previously been appointed the National Security Council chief of staff and advised Trump during the campaign.
Trump is also considering former CIA director David Petraeus and Vice Admiral Robert Harward, a US Navy SEAL, for the post, according to a senior administration official.
The Trump team’s account of Flynn’s discussions with the Russian envoy changed repeatedly over several weeks, including the number of contacts, the dates of those contacts and, ultimately, the content of the conversations.
Late last month, the US Department of Justice warned the White House that Flynn could be in a compromised position as a result of the contradictions between the public depictions of the calls and what intelligence officials knew to be true based on recordings of the conversations, which were picked up as part of routine monitoring of foreign officials’ communications in the US.
A US official said that Flynn was in frequent contact with Russian Ambassador to the US Sergey Kislyak on the day the Obama administration slapped sanctions on Russia for election-related hacking, as well as at other times during the transition.
In Moscow, Russian lawmakers yesterday mounted a fierce defense of Flynn.
Konstantin Kosachev, chairman of the foreign affairs committee in the upper chamber of the Russian parliament, said on Facebook that firing a national security adviser for his contacts with Russia was “not just paranoia, but something even worse.”
Kosachev also expressed his frustration with the Trump administration.
“Either Trump hasn’t found the necessary independence and he’s been driven into a corner ... or ‘Russophobia’ has permeated the new administration from top to bottom,” he said.
Kosachev’s counterpart in the lower chamber of the Russian parliament, Alexei Pushkov, tweeted shortly after the announcement that “it was not Flynn who was targeted, but relations with Russia.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov refused to comment on Flynn’s resignation, saying: “It’s none of our business.”
Asked if Moscow still hopes that relations with the US are going to improve, he said it is “too early to say” since “Trump’s team has not been shaped yet.”
The Kremlin earlier said that it was not expecting a breakthrough before the two presidents meet in person.
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