President Donald Trump has accepted the resignation of his national security advisor Michael Flynn over his links with Russia, the White House has announced.
In his resignation letter, Flynn said he spoke with the Russian ambassador Sergei Kislyak to the US numerous times during the transition and didn’t inform Vice President Mike Pence of all the facts. This includes the possibility that Flynn discussed US sanctions against Russia.
Who is Micheal Flynn?
Flynn, 58, is an ex-lieutenant general from the US Army. Despite being a registered Democrat, he has shown strong support for Trump from the very beginning of his presidential campaign.
His army career spanned 33 years, including serving as the director of intelligence for the Joint Special Operations Command in Iraq and Afghanistan and eventually being nominated by Barack Obama as director of the Defence Intelligence Agency in 2012.
He lasted two years in the position before he was ousted and set up his own consultancy firm.
Why is his resignation such a big deal?
POTUS Trump Names Lt. General Joseph Keith Kellogg, Jr. as Acting National Security Advisor-Accepts Resignation of Lt. General Michael Flynn pic.twitter.com/hrHNuefNe3
— The White House (@WhiteHouse) February 14, 2017
It’s not just that he didn’t tell Mike Pence about the entirety of the conversations. US citizens are barred from conducting diplomacy on behalf of the country without authority from the government – and as the conversations took place during the transition period, he had no such authority.Reports in the US press claim the Justice Department had told the White House a few weeks ago that Flynn could be vulnerable to Russian blackmail.How has Russia reacted?
The Kremlin confirmed that Flynn spoke with Kislyak, but denied they talked about the lifting of sanctions.Members of the Russian parliament were more vocal about the resignation.Konstantin Kosachev, chairman of the foreign affairs committee in the upper chamber of the Russian parliament, said in a post on Facebook that firing a national security adviser for his contacts with Russia is “not just paranoia but something even worse”.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”.Who’s replacing him?For now, it’s retired Lieutenant General Keith Kellogg. He had previously been appointed the National Security Council chief of staff and advised Trump on national security issues during the election campaign.Kellogg is in the running to keep the job on a more permanent basis, but is also facing competition from former CIA director David Petreaus and Navy Seal Robert Harward.
