WASHINGTON — A federal judge on Thursday ordered the release of a voicemail that one of President Donald Trump’s lawyers left for former national security adviser Michael Flynn’s lawyer in November 2017 after learning Flynn was pulling out of a joint defense agreement with the president.
The voicemail was left by John Dowd, who served as one of Trump’s personal lawyers in the Mueller investigation until Dowd resigned in March 2018. According to Robert Mueller’s report, on Nov. 22, 2017, Flynn’s counsel alerted Trump’s lawyers that Flynn was withdrawing from the joint defense agreement and could no longer share confidential information.
As another hurricane season begins, emergency managers and other officials throughout the Southeast and along the Gulf Coast are applying lessons they learned last year during Hurricane Michael. Those lessons include how they conduct evacuations.
Michael was a Category 5 storm that ripped through Florida’s Panhandle with 160 mph winds. The night before it made landfall, Lynn Haven, Fla., Mayor Margo Anderson was in the city’s administrative building preparing to ride out the storm. The National Hurricane Center warned that Michael was strengthening and was now likely to come ashore as a Category 4 storm with winds over 150 mph. She went on Facebook Live with a message for the town’s 20,000 residents: “If you are in a house that you don’t think will take sustained winds of 100 miles per hour for several hours tomorrow,” she warned, “you still have time to go to a shelter.”
As it turned out, Anderson and other officials in the city’s administrative building should have followed that advice. A temporary pavilion now occupies the ground where the administrative building stood. Showing a picture on her cellphone, Anderson points out “the hallway where myself and the 40 members of the police department … ended up at the end of the storm.”
