Trump Is Facing Pressure To Fire Michael Flynn

The past week has held sufficient controversy around the question of whether not the current Security Adviser Michael Flynn will be fired. On Monday, the House Minority leader Nancy Pelosi called on Trump to fire Flynn alongside other California Democrats against Flynn due to concerns over the content of his talks with a Russian ambassador when Obama was still in office.

On Thursday The Washington Post released a report with allegations suggesting that Flynn allegedly discussed sanctions with a Russian ambassador before Donald Trump was inaugurated. According to the report, senior U.S. officials interpreted the phone call with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak as highly inappropriate, indicating that Flynn allegedly might have told the Kremlin there would be a reprieve from the election-related punishments by the Obama administration once Trump took office. A spokesman for Flynn shared a statement neither denying or admitting to the allegations when he said, "[W]hile he had no recollection of discussing sanctions, he couldn’t be certain that the topic never came up.”

When vice president Mike Pence spoke with CBS Face The Nation anchor John Dickerson back in January, he took great measures to defend Flynn, saying,

I can confirm, having spoken to him about it, is that those conversations that happened to occur around the time that the United States took action to expel diplomats had nothing whatsoever to do with those sanctions.

However, now, his tune might be changing with increasing pressure from both the public and politicians, to fire Flynn.

During a press briefing on Monday afternoon, the White House press secretary Sean Spicer shared in a statement that at this point, the security adviser's job status is potentially shaky as Trump is evaluating Flynn. He said:

The President is evaluating the situation. He's speaking to the vice president relative to the conversation the vice president had with Gen. Flynn, and also speaking to various other people about what he considers the single most important subject there is: our national security.

This marks a fairly quick turn around, considering the fact that Spicer's statement was released within hours of senior Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway's statement about Flynn on MSNBC, during which she stated that Flynn, "enjoys the full confidence of the president."

Considering how quickly these matters are moving, it's reasonable to expect that if Flynn isn't fired in the coming days or weeks, the White House will continue to receive pressure from politicians and constituents alike.