Here's how Trump's handling of the Flynn firing could be Mueller's linchpin to prove corrupt intent

The way that President Donald Trump decided to fire national security adviser Michael Flynn back in February 2017 could be the linchpin used by special counsel Robert Mueller to prove the president had a corrupt intent in an obstruction of justice case.

Reporter Maury Waas, in a new report for the New York Review of Books, claims that senior White House attorney John Eisenberg first reviewed intercepted conversations between Flynn and former Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak on or about February 2, 2017.

Most crucially, writes Waas, Eisenberg concluded that the intercepted calls conclusively proved that Flynn had lied to FBI investigators about the nature of the conversations he'd had with Kislyak.

Despite this, it took the Trump White House six days to begin acting on Flynn, and that was only after it had been contacted by the Washington Post, which informed the administration that it was writing a story about Flynn lying about his contacts with Russian officials. Flynn eventually resigned on February 13th, 11 days after Eisenberg reviewed his intercepted calls.

It was this delay, writes Waas, that could establish that Trump had a corrupt intent when he asked former FBI Director James Comey if he could drop Flynn's case -- and then subsequently fired Comey months later after he had refused to do so.

"The president’s legal team has claimed that Trump did nothing wrong because he did not understand that Flynn was in criminal jeopardy when, according to the former FBI director’s testimony, he asked Comey to go easy on Flynn," writes Waas. "The new information that Trump and others in the White House were aware that the intercepts revealed that Flynn had lied to the FBI directly contradicts those claims."

Read Waas' full analysis here.