Top Intelligence Dem: Trump ‘was OK with Flynn being dishonest’

The top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee blasted President Trump Wednesday for defending his former national security adviser, Michael Flynn.

Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) criticized Trump and his administration for blaming the press for Flynn’s departure.

“Somehow, the media is responsible for treating Flynn unfairly, but the president was the one who fired him,” Schiff told MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell.

“He was OK with Flynn being dishonest. He was OK with the vice president misrepresenting the truth to the country. He wasn’t even going to correct the record for the public until this was leaked to The Washington Post. And I suppose what bothers him is being forced to act.”

{mosads}Earlier Wednesday, Trump defended Flynn, saying the former aide was subjected to “criminal” leaks in the “fake media.”  

“I think he’s been treated very, very unfairly by the media — as I call it, the fake media, in many cases.”

He then doubled down on his condemnation of the leaks from the intelligence community that exposed the fact that Flynn misled senior White House officials about his conversations with Russia’s ambassador, tweeting several times.

The real scandal here is that classified information is illegally given out by “intelligence” like candy. Very un-American!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 15, 2017

Schiff attributed the Flynn ordeal to a “dysfunctional White House overall” and said Trump’s tweets are a “hugely disruptive force.”

Cabinet secretaries and top officials “spend a lot of their time chasing down errant tweets by the commander in chief and trying to rationalize them, explain them, turn them into some kind of policy, explain abrupt changes in the course of policy that are previewed by tweet,” he added.