President Trump on Wednesday amplified an effort to raise money for his former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, who had pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI.
Mr. Trump’s account on Twitter shared a tweet posted by Sebastian Gorka, another former adviser to the president, that linked to the website for Flynn’s legal defense fund.
Mr. Gorka, a radio host who left the White House in August 2017, posted the original tweet shortly after it emerged Tuesday that Flynn was seeking to withdraw his guilty plea.
That posting linking to Flynn’s online defense fund has since been shared on Twitter, or retweeted, by more than 5,000 accounts, including most notably Mr. Trump’s, among others.
Flynn, 61, served on Mr. Trump’s election campaign prior to briefly acting as the president’s first national security adviser for roughly three weeks in early 2017.
He resigned after 24 days when it emerged that he misled federal investigators and Vice President Mike Pence about his communications with Russia’s ambassador to the U.S. at the time, Sergey Kislyak, and subsequently pleaded guilty in federal court to a single count of making false statements to the FBI.
“I had to fire General Flynn because he lied to the Vice President and the FBI. He has pled guilty to those lies,” Mr. Trump said previously.
Currently scheduled to be sentenced later this month, Flynn sought to walk back his guilty plea in a motion filed by his lawyers in federal court Tuesday evening.
“Michael T. Flynn (“Mr. Flynn”) hereby moves to withdraw his plea because of the government’s bad faith, vindictiveness, and breach of the plea agreement,” his lawyers wrote.
“Justice is not a game, and there should be no room for such gamesmanship in the Department of Justice,” Flynn’s lawyers wrote, adding that his upcoming sentencing hearing should be postponed by at least a month in light of his attempted reversal.
Federal prosecutors previously recommended Flynn be sentenced to up to six months behind bars for lying to the FBI.
• Andrew Blake can be reached at ablake@washingtontimes.com.
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