Trump aide Michael Flynn tries to buy time

Donald Trump’s former National Security advisor has had his sentencing delayed, after being warned he could be the first White House official to be jailed in relation to the investigation into possible collusion with Russia.

Michael Flynn, who served less than two months in the Trump Administration, pleaded guilty to lying to FBI investigators about his conversations with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak during the transition between Barack Obama’s presidency and Trump’s, and about his lobbying work for the Turkish government at the time.

In a bid to avoid jail time, Flynn struck a plea deal with special counsel Robert Mueller, who is investigating alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian operatives, and cooperated in 19 interviews over the space of a year.

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Judge Emmet Sullivan appeared unmoved by his new found co-operative spirit, however, and spent around 15 minutes lambasting Flynn in court yesterday.

“You were an unregistered agent of a foreign country will serving as the National Security Adviser to the president of the United States,” Vox reporter Andrew Prokop quoted Sullivan as saying.

At one point he even asked whether Flynn could have been charged with treason.

Sullivan suggested Flynn reconsider his request to be sentenced today and instead cooperate further with the special counsel “potentially earning a lesser punishment”, says The Guardian.

The extraordinary rebuke appears to have prompted the U-turn from Flynn and his lawyers. He will now be sentenced in March.

Like Trump’s former lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen, who was sentenced to three years in prison for hush-money payments and lying to Congress last week, speculation is rife about what exactly Flynn has revealed to Mueller about any connections between Trump and Russia.

As the net tightens around the embattled president, a Senate intelligence committee report published yesterday raised further questions about possible collusion.

CNN’s Chris Cuomo’s main takeaway from the report is that “the tactics that the Russians used were really, really similar to what we saw from team Trump”.

Cuomo cited an unnamed senior Trump campaign official who told Bloomberg the Trump campaign were targeting the same groups as the Russians went after: African Americans, young women and white liberals.

In the days ahead of the election the Russian effort focused on spreading allegations of voter fraud and stolen elections, Cuomo says: “You were hearing the same exact thing from then-candidate Donald Trump.”