Donald Trump Suspected for Weeks That Mike Flynn Would Flip

On Friday morning, President Donald Trump learned that his former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn had been charged with lying to the FBI by reportedly seeing news reports.

It was a shock but not necessarily a surprise.

For weeks, Trump has vented privately to advisers and confidants about his anxiety over signs that Flynn had flipped. He noted the possibility that Flynn had “turned on me,” three sources close to the president independently recall him saying. These sources had relayed details of these conversations to The Daily Beast over the course of the past week.

Trump’s fears came into sharp focus this past month, as several media outlets began to report that Flynn appeared to be cooperating with special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 election.

The president—an avid and voracious consumer of Twitter and cable news—began privately fuming, according to an administration official and two outside allies of Trump. Two of the three sources noted that it sounded at times as if Trump felt personally hurt by the prospect that someone whom he admired professionally and liked personally had potentially turned.

Sources said that President Trump’s flourish in his Thanksgiving speech to members of the U.S. Coast Guard—during which he said, “You never know about an ally. An ally can turn”—was intended as not-so-subtle jab at his former national security adviser.

At 10:22 a.m. ET on Friday, Flynn, wearing a gray suit, exited a black Suburban and walked silently through a gauntlet of cameras into a Washington, D.C., courthouse as reporters shouted questions. A man—standing behind a group of reporters next to a woman in a pink knit hat with cat ears—shouted, “Hold on, Putin loves you!” in Russian at the disgraced former national security adviser. Flynn’s heckler, who declined to give his name, wore a cat-ear hat. At one point, an Uber driver rolling past the stakeout honked his horn and shouted at reporters, “Tell Flynn to fuck himself!”

An hour or so later, Flynn put out a statement on the plea deal, saying, “I recognize that the actions I acknowledged in court today were wrong, and, through my faith in God, I am working to set things right.” Flynn said he made his “'agreement to cooperate” with Mueller’s investigation “in the best interests of my family and our country. I accept full responsibility for my actions.”