WASHINGTON -- President-elect Donald Trump's national security adviser and Russia's ambassador to the U.S. have been in frequent contact in recent weeks, a senior U.S. official said Friday.
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After initially denying that Michael Flynn and Ambassador Sergey Kislyak spoke Dec. 29, a Trump official said late Friday that the transition team was aware of one call on the same day President Barack Obama imposed sanctions on Russia.
Trump spokesman Sean Spicer initially said there was one phone call between Flynn and Kislyak on Dec. 28, as well as a Christmas greeting via text messages over the holidays. He said sanctions were not part of the discussions.
"The call centered around the logistics of setting up a call with the president of Russia and the president-elect after he was sworn in, and they exchanged logistical information on how to initiate and schedule that call," Spicer told reporters Friday. "That was it, plain and simple."
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Later Friday, a transition official said Flynn and Kislyak had spoken by phone on Dec. 29, after a text message from the ambassador the day before. During the call, the Russian ambassador invited U.S. officials to a conference on Syria later this month that is being held in Kazakhstan, said the transition official, who was not authorized to publicly discuss the matter and insisted on anonymity.
The transition official also confirmed a phone call between the men earlier in December.
The senior U.S. official, speaking Friday on condition of anonymity, described the contacts between Flynn and Kislyak as "very frequent."
Flynn's contacts with the Russian ambassador were first reported by Washington Post columnist David Ignatius.
It's not unusual for incoming administrations to have discussions with foreign governments before taking office.
Trump spoke with Putin about a week after his election victory. The transition team has not disclosed any other contact between the leaders.
It's unclear how U.S. officials became aware of the contacts between Flynn and Kislyak, who has served as Russia's envoy to the U.S. since 2008. U.S. monitoring of Russian officials' communication within the United States is known to be common.
Flynn has spoken with other foreign officials since Trump won the November election, as have incoming White House senior advisers Steve Bannon and Jared Kushner, Trump's son-in-law. State Department spokesman Mark Toner said he saw nothing inappropriate in Trump's transition team contacting Russian or any other foreign officials.
In an interview published Friday evening by The Wall Street Journal, Trump said he might do away with Obama's sanctions if Russia works with the U.S. on battling terrorists and achieving other goals.
"If Russia is really helping us, why would anybody have sanctions?" he asked.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has not retaliated against the U.S. for the move, a decision Trump has praised.
The sanctions targeted the GRU and FSB, leading Russian intelligence agencies that the U.S. said were involved in the hacking of the Democratic National Committee and other groups. The U.S. also kicked out 35 Russian diplomats who it said were actually intelligence operatives.
Questions about Trump's friendly posture toward Russia have deepened since the election, as he has dismissed U.S. intelligence agencies' assertions about Russia's role in the hacking of Democratic groups. In briefing Trump on their findings, intelligence officials also presented the president-elect with unsubstantiated claims that Russia had amassed compromising personal and financial allegations about him, according to a separate U.S. official.
The Senate Intelligence Committee announced late Friday that it would investigate possible contacts between Russia and people associated with U.S. political campaigns as part of a broader investigation into Moscow's meddling in the 2016 presidential election.
Trump acknowledged for the first time this week that he accepts that Russia was behind the hacking. But he questioned whether officials were leaking information about their meetings with him, warning that would be a "tremendous blot" on their record.
Flynn's own ties with Russia have worried some Republicans who are more skeptical of the Kremlin than Trump appears to be. After leaving his position as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency in 2014, Flynn made appearances on RT, a state-funded Russian television network. In 2015, he was paid to attend an RT gala in Moscow, where he sat next to Putin.
As national security adviser, Flynn will work in the West Wing close to the Oval Office and have frequent access to Trump. Unlike Trump's nominees to lead the Pentagon, State Department and other national security agencies, Flynn's post does not require Senate confirmation.
Pelosi: 'Owed the truth'
House Democrats emerged from a Friday briefing about Russian interference in the election demanding that the FBI investigate what links may have existed between the Kremlin and Trump's campaign.
"The FBI should be investigating this charge, because what is it that the Russians know or have about that communication during the campaign that increases their leverage over this new administration?" House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said after a private briefing with the country's top spy chiefs Friday morning.
Pelosi and other Democrats stressed that an investigation into any ties between Trump and Russia was vital, particularly in light of the release of new, unsubstantiated allegations suggesting the existence of compromising personal and financial links between Trump and Russian agents. A recent CNN report said that Trump was briefed about those allegations in an abridged, two-page addendum to the intelligence community's Russian hacking report.
But lawmakers would not say whether the FBI was already launching such an investigation.
"You know I can't talk about what happened in the meeting," Pelosi told reporters asking whether the FBI was investigating links between Russia and Trump. "I can just say publicly that I think the American people are owed the truth, and there's a great deal of evidence to say that this is an issue of high interest to the American people -- the strength, the integrity of our own democracy. And for that reason the FBI should let us know whether they're doing that investigation or not."
Senate Democrats emerged from a similar briefing with intelligence chiefs Thursday also expressing hope that the intelligence community would dig further into alleged ties between Trump's campaign and the Kremlin. They also endorsed the sourcing behind the intelligence community's findings that Russia engaged in election-related hacks to help Trump's chances of winning.
"I thought it was terrible; it's even worse. And if we don't take it seriously, shame on us," second-ranking Senate Democrat Dick Durbin of Illinois told reporters about the substance of the intelligence community's findings.
But Senate Select Committee on Intelligence chairman Richard Burr, R-N.C., told reporters Thursday that his committee would not be looking into links between the Trump campaign and the Russian government because it has no authority to demand information from campaigns that would be necessary to conduct the investigation, according to several reports.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., a Trump critic who is chairman of the Judiciary Committee's panel on crime and terrorism, would not say Thursday whether he is planning to dig into potential links between the Trump campaign and Russia, deferring that question to the FBI.
"If there were contacts that are unnerving, time will tell," Graham said. He added, in a seeming dig at Trump, that at this point, "a person of reasonable intelligence who does not conclude that the Russians did it really doesn't want to believe the Russians did it."
Democrats are also leaning into the agencies to further examine the unsubstantiated allegations and the source behind them. The source, according to British press, was a former MI6 agent named Christopher Steele, who is now in hiding. Rep. Steve Cohen, D-Tenn., told reporters that intelligence chiefs believe he was a "credible" source.
Cohen added that he thought it would be "negligent if our intelligence officials didn't attempt to talk to [Steele] and get his sources," because Americans "need to find out if any of it's true."
Meanwhile, Democrats and Republicans are welcoming news that the Department of Justice's inspector general is planning to investigate a series of pre-election actions by the department and the FBI.
Democrats are particularly upset about FBI Director James Comey's decision to alert Congress that new emails could pertain to the FBI's closed investigation of Hillary Clinton's server so close to the election.
Lockheed: Deal Near
Meanwhile Friday, in New York, Lockheed Martin Corp.'s chief told Trump that the company is close to a deal with the Pentagon to lower costs "significantly" for the next production lot of its F-35 fighter jet and will boost hiring at the Texas factory where the advanced aircraft is made.
Marillyn Hewson, chief executive officer of the defense contractor, said she assured Trump in a Friday meeting that "I certainly share his views that we need to get the best capability to our men and women in uniform and we need to get it at the lowest possible price."
Lockheed Martin and the F-35, the costliest U.S. weapons system, have been favorite Trump targets on Twitter, injecting new uncertainty into contracting practices at a time when defense spending is expected to rise. "The F-35 program and cost is out of control," Trump wrote in a December tweet. "Billions of dollars can and will be saved on military (and other) purchases after January 20th," Inauguration Day.
After her brief visit to Trump Tower in New York, Hewson told reporters the company is close to a deal that would break an impasse with the Pentagon over the 10th and largest-yet order for the F-35 Lightning II.
The contractor also plans to add 1,800 jobs in Fort Worth, where the F-35 is assembled, Hewson said.
Retired Marine Gen. James Mattis, Trump's nominee for defense secretary, said at his confirmation hearing this week that the president-elect "is serious about getting the best bang for the dollar" with programs such as the F-35. But Mattis also told the Senate Armed Services Committee that "many of our allies have bet their air superiority on the F-35 program, and it binds us tightly together with them."
Information for this article was contributed by Julie Pace, Jonathan Lemire and Bradley Klapper of The Associated Press; by Karoun Demirjian of The Washington Post; and by Julie Johnsson, Terrence Dopp and Tony Capaccio of Bloomberg News.
A Section on 01/14/2017