Former national security adviser Mike Flynn pleads guilty to lying to FBI

The charge - and Mr Flynn’s abrupt guilty plea - is the culmination of an investigation Mr Trump had once asked the FBI to drop.

Prosecutors said in court that Mr Flynn had agreed to cooperate with the authorities, meaning an aide who once was in the president's inner circle is providing evidence in an investigation that has cast a cloud over Mr Trump's first year in office.

In court on Friday morning, prosecutors said at least some of Mr Flynn's contacts with Russian officials had been coordinated with a "senior official of the presidential transition".

In a court filing made public, prosecutors alleged that Mr Flynn “did willfully and knowingly make materially false, fictitious and fraudulent statements” to FBI agents during a January 24 interview about his conversations with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak in the weeks before Mr Trump took office.

Prosecutors charged that he falsely told FBI agents that he did not ask Mr Kislyak to delay a vote on a pending United Nations Security Council resolution when the two men spoke in December.

They also charged that he lied to agents about a December 29 conversation about how Russia might respond to sanctions the U.S. government had levied over its election meddling. Shortly after that call with Mr Kislyak, Mr Flynn placed a call to a "senior official of the presidential transition" at Mr Trump's private Mar-a-Lago resort, one of Mr Mueller's prosecutors, Brandon Van Grack, said. Then he called the ambassador again.

In a statement, Mr Flynn said: "I recognise that the actions I acknowledged in court today were wrong, and, through my faith in God, I am working to set things right. My guilty plea and agreement to cooperate with the Special Counsel's Office reflect a decision I made in the best interests of my family and of our country."

Mr Flynn, a former Army general, intelligence agency head, and one of Mr Trump’s closest advisers during his campaign and in the early days of his administration, was widely known to have been under scrutiny over his contacts with Russian officials before Mr Trump assumed the presidency. He also had faced scrutiny over his business dealings, including $530,000 in earnings from a Dutch firm with ties to the Turkish government, and payment for his 2015 Moscow speech.

Mr Flynn had not registered as a foreign agent – a legal requirement – when he accepted money from the Dutch company and only disclosed the payments after registering retroactively amid news reports of the failing. Mr Flynn’s attorney, has maintained that his client had “fully” informed the Defense Department of his trip to Russia. He registered with the Justice Department after he was ousted from the Trump administration.

The administration sought to distance itself from Mr Flynn on Friday. In a statement, White House lawyer Ty Cobb described the former Trump confidante as "a former National Security Advisor at the White House for 25 days and a former Obama administration official." Nothing about Mr Flynn's guilty plea, he said, "implicates anyone other than Mr Flynn".

Mr Flynn resigned from the administration in February after misleading Vice President Mike Pence about his conversations with Russian officials. Mr Pence publicly announced that Mr Flynn assured him the subject of sanctions the Obama administration imposed on Russia were not raised in his conversations with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak after the election. Authorities who had monitored communications involving foreign diplomats knew that was not the case.

The day after Mr Flynn resigned, then-FBI director Comey said Mr Trump pressured him to end the bureau’s criminal investigation. Mr Comey, who was himself ousted in May, testified to a Senate panel this year that Mr Trump told him Mr Flynn was “a good guy” and that “I hope you can let this go”.

At a news conference the following day, Mr Trump praised Mr Flynn as "a wonderful man" and said: "I think he has been treated very, very unfairly by the media, as I call it, the fake media in many cases."

Mr Mueller’s investigators have separately been gathering records about Mr Trump’s decision to fire Mr Comey.

Mr Mueller’s office also has filed charges against Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort and an associate, Rick Gates. Another campaign aide, George Papadopoulos, that he lied to FBI agents about his contacts with a professor he believed "had substantial connections to Russian government officials" during the campaign. The professor offered him "dirt" — in the form of thousands of emails — on Trump’s election opponent, Hillary Clinton.

In court filings, prosecutors said that Mr Papadopoulos had agreed to cooperate with Mr Mueller’s investigation.