Donald Trump 'wants to bring Michael Flynn back to the White House'
President Donald Trump wants to find a way to get his former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn back into the White House, according to reports.
Although Mr Flynn is at the centre of ongoing scandal that has swirled around Mr Trump’s presidency, he hopes that he can find a place for the man who was forced to resign over reports that he had misrepresented conversations he had with Russian officials during the transition period, the Daily Beast said.
“Trump feels really, really, really, bad about firing him, and he genuinely thinks if the investigation is over Flynn can come back,” a White House official said.
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Mr Flynn, sources close to him say, didn’t even really want the job in the first place.
“He did not want to be National Security Adviser,” Michael Ledeen, a friend of Mr Flynn’s, said. “He didn’t want to be in the government. He wanted to go back to private life.”
“But Trump insisted on it,” he continued.
That Mr Trump reportedly wants to find a new position for Mr Flynn may strike some as odd. Since his forced resignation in February, several developments have bolstered concerns that he could have been influenced by Russians. It was also discovered that he was on the payroll of a lobbying firm representing the interests of the Turkish government while he was working on the Trump campaign.
While that information only recently became public, reporting indicates that Mr Flynn had told the Trump team that he was under investigation for that work before he accepted the national security adviser position. The Trump administration pushed forward anyway, and ignored warnings from former acting attorney general Sally Yates that Mr Flynn could have been compromised by Russians.
The saga of Mr Flynn is also tangled up in another scandal Mr Trump is facing — his decision to fire former FBI Director James Comey. Mr Trump, according to a memo written by Mr Comey at the time, reportedly attempted to pressure him to drop the FBI’s investigation into Mr Flynn. Mr Comey refused.
A special prosecutor was recently assigned to take control of the probe into Russia’s involvement in the 2016 election.
