Former national security adviser Michael Flynn was warned by senior members of President Trump’s transition team about the risks of his contacts with the Russian ambassador weeks before the December call that led to Flynn’s forced resignation, current and former U.S. officials said.

Flynn was told during a late November meeting that Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak’s conversations were almost certainly being monitored by U.S. intelligence agencies, officials said, a caution that came a month before Flynn was recorded discussing U.S. sanctions against Russia with Kislyak, suggesting that the Trump administration would reevaluate the issue.

Officials were so concerned that Flynn did not fully understand the motives of the Russian ambassador that the head of Trump’s national security council transition team asked Obama administration officials for a classified CIA profile of Kislyak, officials said. The document was delivered within days, officials said, but it is not clear that Flynn ever read it.

The previously undisclosed sequence reveals the extent to which even some Trump insiders were troubled by the still-forming administration’s entanglements with Russia and its enthusiasm for a friendly relationship with the Kremlin.

The failed efforts to intervene with Flynn also cast harsh new light on a national security adviser who lasted just 24 days on the job before revelations about his discussions with Kislyak — and misleading accounts of them — forced him to resign.

Team Trump’s ties to Russian interests View Graphic Team Trump’s ties to Russian interests

Robert Kelner, a lawyer for Flynn, declined to comment.

Providing the Kislyak bio was seen by Obama officials as part of an effort “to make sure the new team had a full appreciation of the extent of the threat from Russia,” a former U.S. official said.

The perceived need to impress this point upon Flynn added to the growing concerns among senior members of the Obama administration, who at the time were still coming to grips with the scale of Russian interference in the 2016 election and were worried that any punitive measures they imposed might be rescinded when Trump was sworn in.

The request for the Kislyak document came from Marshall Billingslea, a former senior Pentagon official in the George W. Bush administration who led Trump’s national security transition team from November until shortly before Trump’s inauguration.

Billingslea, who declined requests for comment, was nominated this week for a high-level position in the Treasury Department overseeing efforts to disrupt terrorist financing.

A former deputy undersecretary of the Navy, Billingslea was among a small group of experienced national security hands on the Trump transition whose entrenched skepticism toward Russia seemed at odds with the pro-Moscow impulses of Flynn and the incoming president, according to the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss Trump personnel and ­decision-making.

Others included Samantha Ravich, a deputy national security adviser to Vice President Richard B. Cheney; and Christopher Ford, a former State Department official who now works as a special assistant on counterproliferation issues in the Trump White House.

Ravich declined to comment. A spokesman for the National Security Council did not respond to requests for comment from Ford.

The Trump administration has taken a harsher tone toward Russia in recent weeks after the ­Syrian government, which is backed by Moscow, used chemical weapons on civilians. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson last month accused Russia of being “incompetent or complicit” in the attack, and CIA Director Mike Pompeo described Russian President Vladi­mir Putin as “a man for whom ‘veracity’ doesn’t translate.”

But Trump has pointedly refused to employ such language himself and this week renewed his skepticism that Russia was responsible for a hacking and propaganda campaign targeting last year’s presidential race — a position held by the president that is at odds with the unanimous view of U.S. intelligence agencies.

Asked during a recent CBS interview whether he believed the allegations of Russian meddling, Trump said, “I’ll go along with Russia. Could’ve been China, could’ve been a lot of different groups.”

The unusual steps taken by transition officials working with Flynn suggest that internal tensions over Russia began almost immediately after Trump’s victory in an election that Moscow sought to help him win, according to a declassified report from U.S. intelligence agencies.

Billingslea was selected in early November to head the effort to assemble a national security team for Trump in Washington, leading a “landing team” that was based in offices at the General Services Administration headquarters but also had space in the Old Executive Office Building adjacent to the White House.

The effort was hampered by confusion in the election’s aftermath, friction among factions competing for influence with Trump, and communication difficulties created by an arrangement in which the landing team was based in Washington but Flynn and his deputy, K.T. McFarland, spent almost all of their time at Trump Tower in New York.

In an attempt to improve coordination, the group scheduled a November meeting in Washington, a session attended by Flynn as well as about a dozen aides and staff members from other departments, officials said. Others also participated by phone.

As Flynn went through his upcoming appointments, he mentioned that he was being inundated with requests for meetings from diplomats. Most would have to wait to get access to Trump’s designated national security adviser, a position that would give Flynn enormous influence in the White House. Flynn then revealed that he’d already scheduled a conversation with Kislyak.

Meetings with foreign counterparts are commonplace for incoming national security advisers. But the reference to Kislyak raised eyebrows among officials who had spent much of their careers treating Russia as an adversary and avoiding encounters with Russian officials who might be engaged in espionage.

Several also worried that engaging with Kislyak, even if appropriate, had only political downsides for Trump, whose effusive praise of Putin during the campaign had fanned suspicion about his associates’ ties to Moscow.

Billingslea warned Flynn that Kislyak was likely a target of U.S. surveillance and that his communications — whether with U.S. persons or superiors in Moscow — were undoubtedly being monitored by the FBI and National Security Agency, according to officials familiar with the exchange. Flynn, a retired Army lieutenant general who led the Defense Intelligence Agency, would presumably have been aware of such surveillance.

Billingslea then said that he would obtain a copy of the profile of Kislyak, officials said, a document that Billingslea urged Flynn to read if he were going to communicate with the Russian envoy. Flynn’s reaction was noncommittal, officials said, neither objecting to the feedback nor signaling agreement.

Shortly thereafter, during the week of Nov. 28, Billingslea and other transition officials met with lower-level Obama administration officials in the Situation Room at the White House.

At the end of the meeting, which covered a range of subjects, Billingslea asked for the CIA profile. “Can we get material on Kislyak?” one recalled Billingslea asking.

Days later, Flynn took part in a meeting with Kislyak at Trump Tower. White House spokeswoman Hope Hicks has confirmed that both Flynn and Jared Kushner, Trump’s adviser and son-in-law, took part in that session, which was not publicly disclosed at the time.

It’s not clear whether the Kislyak profile was shared before that meeting. Flynn continued to communicate with Kislyak, however, exchanging text messages and cellphone calls, culminating in a conversation intercepted by U.S. intelligence agencies just as the Obama administration was announcing election-related sanctions on Russia.

The Dec. 29 measures included the expulsion of 35 suspected Russian spies, the closure of two Russian compounds, in Maryland and New York, and economic sanctions against Russian intelligence services and officials.

Kislyak would have been keenly interested in whether the Trump administration, just weeks from taking office, intended to enforce these measures. After denying for weeks that he had discussed the sanctions with Kislyak, Flynn altered his story in early February when told that The Washington Post planned to publish a story saying he had done so, citing multiple sources familiar with the contents of the Kislyak call.

Flynn was forced to resign days later and may face other consequences for his dealings with Russia. The FBI has interviewed Flynn about the conversations with Kislyak. Flynn is also under investigation by the Pentagon’s inspector general over $45,000 he accepted for appearing at a 2015 event in Russia and $530,000 his former consulting firm was paid for work tied to the Turkish government.

The CIA bio on Kislyak was placed in a room in the Trump transition offices set up to handle classified material. Officials familiar with the document said that even if Flynn had read it, there was little in it that would have triggered alarms.

The file spanned three or four pages, describing Kislyak’s diplomatic career, extensive involvement in arms negotiations, and reputation as a determined proponent of Russian interests. It noted that he routinely reported information back to Moscow and that any information he gathered would be shared with Russia’s intelligence services. But the file did not say Kislyak was a spy.

During Flynn’s fleeting tenure as national security adviser, he had several follow-on conversations with Kislyak, and at one point Flynn proposed a lunch, officials said. The Russian Embassy called repeatedly to collect on that offer, officials said, until Flynn was fired and the calls stopped.

Karen DeYoung, Ellen Nakashima and Julie Tate contributed to this report.

House Republicans on Thursday narrowly passed a controversial bill to overhaul the nation’s health-care system, claiming a major victory even as the measure faces an uncertain fate in the closely divided U.S. Senate.

Under intense pressure to show they can govern and to make good on their promise to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, Republicans pushed through the bill after adopting a last-minute change that earned it just enough votes to pass. However, the House version fell significantly short of the GOP’s long-held goals, making major dents in large portions of the current law but not outright repealing it.

The bumpy, months-long process that led to Thursday’s vote also violated some of the GOP’s own promises on how they would govern.

The measure proceeded without the benefit of an analysis from the Congressional Budget Office of its cost and impact on insurance coverage, and it did so after many Republicans openly acknowledged that they hadn’t read the bill. President Trump also promised “insurance for everybody,” which the measure will not achieve.

The American Health Care Act, which passed by a vote of 217 to 213, nonetheless represented a significant if incomplete political victory for President Trump, who has struggled to secure legislative wins early in his presidency. The vote was also an important win for House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.), who has spent years trying to dismantle Obamacare but has struggled in recent months to unite an ideologically divided caucus.

The House bill would shift power to states to set important health insurance rules. And it would end the ACA’s subsidies for eligible people who buy health plans through marketplaces created under the law, creating and substituting new tax credits. It also would rescind several taxes that have helped pay for the law, including ones imposed on Americans with high incomes, health insurers, medical devices and tanning salons.

Among the bill’s more contentious provisions is one that would allow states to let insurers return to their old practice of charging more to customers with preexisting medical problems — a practice that current law prohibits.

Republicans claimed credit for taking a first step toward meeting their promise with a televised celebration in the White House Rose Garden — which Trump attended after postponing a long-planned event in New York with Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the Battle of the Coral Sea.

“We’re going to get this passed through the Senate — I’m so confident,” Trump said.

“This has really brought the Republican Party together,” he added.

[What is in the Republican health-care bill? Your questions answered.]

Democrats, however, held their own celebration of sorts immediately after the vote, waving to Republicans on the House floor and chanting, “Hey, hey, hey, goodbye” — an apparent taunt suggesting that Republicans would lose elections next year as a result of the vote.

How the House voted to pass the GOP health-care bill. View Graphic How the House voted to pass the GOP health-care bill.

Before the vote, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) noted that while many Americans can’t name their member of Congress, Thursday’s vote would earn their ire.

“You will glow in the dark on this one,” Pelosi warned. “So don’t walk the plank, especially unnecessarily.”

The political positioning over the bill started immediately, with the GOP claiming that it would lower premiums and increase access to health insurance and Democrats casting it as a huge transfer of wealth because it would eliminate many of the taxes imposed under the Affordable Care Act, including on wealthy Americans.

And the nation’s health insurance industry, which has been lobbying for an aspect of the bill that would eliminate an ACA tax on insurers, nevertheless reacted critically to the House vote. The legislation “needs important improvements to protect low- and moderate-income families,” said Marilyn Tavenner, president of the trade group America’s Health Insurance Plans. She cited changes the bill would make to Medicaid and to tax credits for older Americans who buy coverage on their own, as well as lingering uncertainty over the fate of an ACA subsidy that helps nearly 6 million Americans with insurance co-pays and deductibles.

Every Democrat and 20 Republicans voted against the measure, the latter a mix of ardent conservatives upset that the bill didn’t fully repeal Obamacare and members from suburban swing districts worried about the political fallout. The wide-ranging interpretations of whether the bill would gut the current law — or wouldn’t — are likely to fuel the nature and intensity of that fallout.

For instance, the measure does not eliminate the ACA’s requirement that most Americans carry health insurance, although the penalty for not having coverage would be erased. In its place, insurers would be allowed to charge 30 percent higher premiums for one year to customers who have had a gap in coverage of roughly two months or more.

Medicaid would also be transformed in two ways. For the 31 states that expanded the safety-net program under the ACA to include people with slightly higher incomes, the government would immediately stop paying for anyone new to enroll under the expansion and would eventually stop the extra federal money that came with the expansion. Starting in a few years, Medicaid would also end its half-century tradition as an entitlement program in which the government pays a certain share for each person who enrolls, switching instead to a “cap” with a fixed amount per person.

The vote capped a haphazard, months-long process that began before Trump’s inauguration but quickly became mired in intraparty disagreement over how Republicans should make good on the campaign promise they had been running — and winning — on since 2010, when then-President Obama’s signature domestic policy achievement became law.

In March, Ryan pulled an earlier version of the measure after it became clear that he did not have the votes to pass it — primarily because of strong opposition from the conservative House Freedom Caucus.

After a two-week Easter recess, however, negotiations resumed, and Republicans came up with a new proposal that garnered support from Freedom Caucus members by allowing states to eliminate parts of the ACA that require insurers to include specific “essential health benefits” in health plans sold to individuals and small business and to set their own coverage requirements or none at all. The new version also added the language affecting customers with preexisting medical conditions.

The new proposal, however, threatened support among members of the House’s more moderate Tuesday Group. That, in turn, prompted yet another tweak this week to add $8 billion to help people with preexisting conditions pay for their health-care costs.

The amendment prompted powerful objections from a wide range of health policy experts and advocates, who questioned whether the amount of money was sufficient to help all the Americans who would need it.

It also revived questions about the measure’s fate in the Senate, where widespread disagreement remains among Republicans about how to proceed on health care. First, the Senate’s parliamentarian — or rules-keeper — cannot review the legislation and determine the rules of debate until the CBO submits its official estimate, which could take several more weeks to complete, according to congressional aides. That would mean that official Senate debate on the bill could not begin until June.

Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.), the second-ranking Republican, declined to commit to a schedule for when the Senate will begin consideration of the House health care rewrite.

“There is no timeline,” he said. “When we get 51 senators we’ll vote.”

But other senators made clear that the process would be more deliberative in the upper chamber of Congress.

“A bill — finalized yesterday, has not been scored, amendments not allowed, and 3 hours final debate — should be viewed with caution,” Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) tweeted on Thursday before the House vote.

House Republicans insisted that they were not ramming their health-care bill through without giving members a chance to absorb it — as they accused Democrats of doing when the ACA was passed in 2010.

[Which Republicans are putting the health-care bill in jeopardy this time]

Democrats “put a 2,000-page bill on the table they knew no one had time to read, and we’re not doing that,” said Rep. H. Morgan Griffith (R-Va.).

“This is a rough and tumble exercise that the Founding Fathers anticipated,” he added.

House Freedom Caucus Chairman Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) said he was willing to abandon his previous demands that leaders allow hearings and discussion of the legislation because members had opportunities to weigh in on amendments over the past several days. The decision marked a measurable shift for hard-line Freedom Caucus members, who have insisted that leaders give them ample time to read legislation and weigh in before a bill comes up for a vote.

“I have read the bill no less than six times,” Meadows said. “If they haven’t read the bill it is because they haven’t spent the time to do that.”

Republicans also disregarded the absence of a final estimate from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office — Congress’s official scorekeeper. Several said that last-minute changes to the legislation were unlikely to significantly change the final estimates.

“We’re still comfortable we’re saving billions and billions of dollars,” said Rep. Chris Collins (R-N.Y.).

Meadows, who struggled for weeks to rally his caucus around the measure, said the Senate will make changes he might not necessarily back.

Among other concerns, GOP senators from states that have expanded Medicaid under the ACA worry about rollbacks to that program included in the House bill. Then there’s a trio of conservative senators — Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Rand Paul (R-Ky.) — who often buck GOP leaders. With just a 52-48 advantage over Democrats, Senate Republicans have a smaller margin for error than their House counterparts.

The House measure may run into other procedural roadblocks in the Senate. The original proposal initially left many of the ACA’s insurance regulations alone — with the goal of ensuring it would pass muster with the Senate parliamentarian — but not all of them. The House’s version of the bill would undercut the ACA’s insurance regulations even more. That might make it difficult for Republican senators to pass the measure under a procedural maneuver known as “reconciliation,” which is usually reserved for budget legislation.

Due to a series of resignations, Republicans needed just 216 votes to pass the bill, but left nothing to chance. Even Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), recovering from recent foot surgery, flew back to Washington against his doctor’s orders to vote for the bill.

“It was a big important vote, and it was close. I didn’t want to be the reason it failed,” he told reporters.

While some Republicans were buoyant, others exhibited a palpable sense of relief that health care is off their plates — at least for now.

“It wasn’t fun,” said Rep. Lou Barletta (R-Pa.).

Sean Sullivan, John Wagner, David Weigel, Kelsey Snell, Dino Grandoni, Elise Viebeck and Robert Costa contributed to this report.

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