Obama warned Trump against hiring Michael Flynn
Former President Obama warned Donald Trump last fall against hiring Michael Flynn, three officials familiar with the conversation confirmed to CBS News' Major Garrett.
Obama told Mr. Trump, who was president-elect at the time, to watch out for Flynn and warned him that Flynn would be bad news and that he would be wise to stay away from Flynn. This all occurred during their first meeting at the White House.
Trump, however, decided to hire Flynn anyway as his national security adviser at the White House. But just weeks into the administration, in February, Trump forced Flynn to resign because he had mislead the vice president about his contacts with the Russian ambassador to the U.S.
In his briefing on Monday, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer said that this warning from Obama was founded in "bad blood" between the former president and Flynn, rather than in national security interest.
"President Obama made it known that he wasn't exactly a fan of General Flynn's," Spicer said. "If President Obama was truly concerned about General Flynn, why didn't he suspend General Flynn's security clearance, which they had just reapproved months earlier?" he later added.
Spicer argued that "there were steps that they could have taken" within the Obama administration if there had been true cause for concern about Flynn.
Those close to President Trump say he wasn't sure what to make of Obama's warning about Flynn – and some feared it wasn't advice given in good faith but rather, that Obama might have other motives.
This development comes just before former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper are set to testify before the Senate Judiciary's Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism Monday afternoon. Yates is expected to address information she had about Flynn's conduct.
This marks the first time Yates will be testifying before Congress on Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election. Yates was fired by the Trump administration in January after she refused to defend President Trump's travel ban in court. She was originally scheduled to testify in March after she asked the Justice Department if she could do so, but the White House was later accused of blocking her testimony.
