Investigators of special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, are examining the documents related to former national security adviser Michael T. Flynn to see if he was secretly paid by the Turkish government to lobby against a critic of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Mueller's team has asked the White House for documents related to Flynn's lobbying and questioned witnesses about whether he was paid by the Turkish government, according to a report from The New York Times.The document request was not a formal subpoena, the newspaper has reported.
"The White House will not be discussing any specific communications with the Special Counsel out of respect for the Special Counsel and his process. Beyond that, as I have stressed repeatedly, we continue to fully cooperate with the Special Counsel,"CNN quoted Ty Cobb, the White House special counsel as saying.
"We've said before we're collaborating with the special counsel on an ongoing basis," he told the newspaper."It's full cooperation mode as far as we are concerned," he said, according to the report.
Flynn's former lobbying firm, the Flynn Intel Group, was paid $530,000 to represent a Turkish businessman Ekim Alptekin but the contract ended in mid-Novermber 2016 because that time Flynn was announced as President Donald Trump's first national security adviser.
Flynn was forced to resign in February after 24 days as national security adviser after it was reported that he misled Vice President Mike Pence about the nature of his phone calls with the Russian ambassador to the US, Sergey Kislyak.Since then, Flynn has become a target of both federal and congressional investigators and prosecutors have used multiple grand juries to issue subpoenas for documents related to him.