Why did Flynn lie to the FBI?

I think that's a good question, and we have to wonder where we might be right now had he not lied. Josh Marshall is scratching his head:

Among the many new questions following former National Security Advisor Mike Flynn’s guilty plea Friday to lying to the FBI is: Why did he lie in the first place?

By the time Flynn was interviewed by the FBI in late January 2017, his contacts with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak had been publicly reported.

[...]

We now also know that other people in Trump’s orbit knew about, and even directed, Flynn’s message to Kislyak about the sanctions.

As the Mueller filings detail, before talking to Kislyak, Flynn called a “senior official of the Presidential Transition team” who was with “other senior members” of the team at Mar-A-Lago, and they discussed that the “members of the Presidential Transition team at Mar-A-Lago did not want Russia to escalate the situation.”

[...]

Flynn — a retired three star general who once served as the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency — then lied to FBI agents about the details of the call, even after he knew a “U.S. government official,” as Ignatius sourced his report, was aware of the call and leaking it to the press.

Sally Yates, the top official at the Justice Department at the time, alerted the White House [...] on multiple occasions that Flynn had been lying to senior officials about his contact with Russian officials. (She was later fired for refusing to defend in court President Trump’s travel ban.)

But Flynn remained in his role as NSA for more than two weeks after that, and was only ousted when the Washington Post and others confirmed that sanctions had come up on the call.

[...]

Had Flynn not thought of the possibility that his call with Kislyak could have been under surveillance when he talked to the FBI? Or was there just something bigger that he was trying to hide? By the account of the Trump administration, he was fired for lying to Vice President Mike Pence, who claimed after the Jan. 12 report that Flynn had told him that he “did not discuss anything having to do with the United States’ decision to expel diplomats or impose censure against Russia.” Pence, it’s worth noting, was in Indiana during the time of the call. But at least handful of people knew about the phone call’s subject matter at the time that it happened. Did they know about Flynn’s decision to lie to the FBI about it as well?

  TPM

If I had to guess, I'd say he discussed the decision with that group at Mar-a-Lago, and with Trump himself who promised - or maybe just suggested - a pardon if he got caught. And I'd guess that's the reason he flipped to Mueller - he found out he wasn't going to get a pardon, and he was having to pay his own legal bills, unlike Junior and Kushner.  He'd been used and dumped.

I can speculate like everyone else, and I think that's a pretty good guess. They didn't heed Yates' warnings about Flynn's lies because they were in on the lies, which were directed mostly to Sean Spicer - their useful toady - so he could repeat them publicly.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.