According to a report published in The Washington Post Wednesday, President Donald Trump’s legal team is preparing to mount a scorched-earth attack on the credibility and reputation of ousted national security adviser Mike Flynn.

If Michael Flynn accuses President Trump or any of his top aides of wrongdoing in their relations with Russian officials, Trump’s lawyers are preparing to call him a liar trying to protect himself, according to the Post.

Trump has remained steadfastly supportive of Flynn in his public statements, calling him a good man who has led “a very strong life” and labeling the charges against Flynn “very unfair.” He did not rule out pardoning Flynn as recently as this month.

However, as Vanity Fair‘s Chris Smith points out, that’s a strategy born out of fear that a bombshell may drop anytime.

“Imagine that — a defense attorney is going to attack the prosecution’s witness, if Flynn has anything bad to say about Trump,” quipped Washington defense attorney Sol Wisenberg, who was deputy independent counsel in the Whitewater and Monica Lewinsky investigations of the 1990s. “Wow — the next thing you’re going to tell me is Dewey took Manila. If Flynn has some real dirt on Trump, then, yeah, they’ll have to destroy him.”

Wisenberg speculated that there may be a second, secret plea deal between Flynn and special counsel Robert Mueller, one that contains evidence of coordination and collusion between the Trump 2016 campaign and Russia. This would explain “the apparent thinness of the public plea deal,” said Smith.

Smith points out that if Trump is publicly defending Flynn, then Trump’s propagandists like Sean Hannity “are free to turn up the attacks on Flynn, to trash him as one more enemy of the president, which in turn embellishes Trump’s outsider image with his hard-core voters.”

It also signals to Flynn that if he is hoping for a presidential pardon, he’d best not testify damningly about Trump, Smith said.

“Mueller, however, seems to have wisely anticipated such a chess move: by crafting a plea deal that basically guarantees Flynn won’t serve any time in jail, the special counsel reduced the temptation to not cooperate and be rewarded by a pardon,” Smith wrote.

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