While President Trump focused much of his Thursday Fox News interview on defending himself in the wake of Michael Cohen's sentencing for hush-money payments allegedly ordered by the president, Trump also managed to work in a defense of former national security advisor Michael Flynn and attack the special counsel.
He ... used the case of his former national security adviser Michael Flynn to claim that Mueller is coercing people into lying about their activities.
“They gave General Flynn a great deal because they were embarrassed by the way he was treated - the FBI said he didn’t lie and they overrode the FBI,” Trump tweeted later Thursday morning. “They want to scare everybody into making up stories that are not true by catching them in the smallest of misstatements. Sad!”
Attorneys for Flynn, who pleaded guilty last December to lying to the FBI during the early stages of its Russia probe, asked a federal judge on Tuesday to spare him any jail time because of his “extensive cooperation” with Mueller.
But Flynn’s lawyers also came close to suggesting that the misstatements at the center of his guilty plea might have been inadvertent and the result of the way his initial FBI interview arose just a few days after the inauguration and well before there was a publicly acknowledged investigation into Russian interference.
House Republicans earlier this year wrote in a report that FBI agents initially did not believe Flynn lied to them about his interactions with Russia’s ambassador during the transition. But last week, former FBI Director James Comey told lawmakers that agents had concluded Flynn was “obviously lying” to them, even though he didn’t show any of the common physical traits of deception, such as sweating or hesitating to answer.
On Thursday, Trump quickly followed up his tweet about Flynn — his first about his former adviser since April — with a familiar message: “WITCH HUNT!”
Trump ducks for legal cover after Cohen sentencing (Politico)