Trump team warned by Justice Dept. 'weeks ago' Flynn was vulnerable to Russia blackmail

Sally Q. Yates is looking more like a hero each day. Before she was fired by Donald Trump, the then-acting attorney general told the incoming administration in late January that she believed then-NatSec-advisor General Michael Flynn “had misled senior administration officials about the nature of his communications with the Russian ambassador to the United States, and warned that the national security adviser was potentially vulnerable to Russian blackmail.”

The Washington Post reported the story just hours before Flynn resigned in disgrace.

A senior administration official admitted to the Washington Post the Trump White House had long been aware of the grave nature of the matter– “we’ve been working on this for weeks,” they said.

But as late as Monday night, The White House was still pushing a statement that Trump was “evaluating the situation” regarding Flynn.

From the Washington Post report this afternoon, Ellen Nakashima and Adam Entous:

The message, delivered by Sally Q. Yates and a senior career national security official to the White House counsel, was prompted by concerns that ­Flynn, when asked about his calls and texts with the Russian diplomat, had told Vice ­President-elect Mike Pence and others that he had not discussed the Obama administration sanctions on Russia for its interference in the 2016 election, the officials said. It is unclear what the White House counsel, Donald McGahn, did with the information.

In the waning days of the Obama administration, James R. Clapper Jr., who was the director of national intelligence, and John Brennan, the CIA director at the time, shared Yates’s concerns and concurred with her recommendation to inform the Trump White House. They feared that “Flynn had put himself in a compromising position” and thought that Pence had a right to know that he had been misled, according to one of the officials, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters.

(…) The current and former officials said that although they believed that Pence was misled about the contents of Flynn’s communications with the Russian ambassador, they couldn’t rule out that Flynn was acting with the knowledge of others in the transition.