Trump says he's 'very happy' Flynn's guilty plea shows 'no collusion'

(Image credit: Mandel Ngan/Getty Images)

"What has been shown is no collusion, no collusion," President Trump told reporters Saturday morning in response to the Friday news that his former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn pleaded guilty of lying to the FBI about his contact with a former Russian ambassador. "There's been absolutely no collusion, so we're very happy," Trump reiterated, before changing the subject to the morning's passage of the Senate tax reform bill. "Frankly, last night was one of the big nights," he said.

Meanwhile, one of Trump's lawyers, Jay Sekulow, told The New Yorker that even if collusion did occur between members of the Trump campaign and the Russian government, it would not be a crime because there is no federal law against collusion itself. "For something to be a crime, there has to be a statute that you claim is being violated," Sekulow said. "There is not a statute that refers to criminal collusion. There is no crime of collusion."

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.