Trump's former national security adviser could have been blackmailed by the Russians, Yates tells the Senate.

Former acting Attorney General Sally Yates cast a harsh light on the White House on Monday, detailing how she had informed Trump administration officials that then-national security adviser Michael Flynn was susceptible to blackmail from Russia, only to watch President Donald Trump take 18 days to fire him.

“We believed that Gen. Flynn was compromised,” she testified at a highly anticipated Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing. “To state the obvious, you don’t want your national security adviser compromised with the Russians.”

Yates said she warned White House counsel Don McGahn in late January that Flynn, a retired Army lieutenant general, had misled Vice President Mike Pence and other senior officials and that as a result, public statements by White House officials were inaccurate.

Yates’ testimony was the first time she has publicly addressed what has become a major controversy for the White House, given that Trump waited nearly three weeks after Yates’ warning to fire Flynn. By then, it had been reported in the news media that Flynn had misled Pence and other officials when he told them his phone calls with Russia’s ambassador did not include a discussion of sanctions. Yates said Russia was aware that Flynn had misled his colleagues and could have used that information against him.

Democrats seized on this 18-day gap during the hearing, noting that Flynn was involved in high-level national security decisions, including new sanctions on Iran, after the White House had been informed he could be blackmailed.

“Maybe, just maybe, [Trump] didn’t get rid of a guy who lied to the vice president, who got paid by the Russians, who went on Russia Today, because there are other people in his administration who met secretly with the Russians and didn’t reveal it until later, until they were caught,” said Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.). “That may be why it took him 18 days, until it became public, to get rid of Mike Flynn, who was a danger to this republic.”

Earlier on Monday, Trump launched a preemptive Twitter strike on Yates. He urged lawmakers to ask Yates whether she was responsible for classified information about Flynn’s conversations with Russia’s ambassador being leaked to the news media. “Ask Sally Yates, under oath, if she knows how classified information got into the newspapers soon after she explained it to W.H. [counsel],” Trump wrote.

Yates and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who testified alongside Yates, said they did not know how classified information about Flynn’s conversations with Russia’s ambassador ended up in The Washington Post. Both also told members of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism that they had never leaked classified information to the news media, nor authorized anyone else to do so.

Trump took to Twitter after the hearing to try to claim vindication.

“Sally Yates made the fake media extremely unhappy today — she said nothing but old news!” he wrote. “The Russia-Trump collusion story is a total hoax, when will this taxpayer funded charade end?”

After the hearing, subcommittee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) praised Yates, saying she “did the right thing” by taking her concerns about Flynn to the White House. But Graham also said he had no problem with the White House’s handling of the issue.

“All I do know is that Gen. Flynn got fired,” he told reporters. “To me, that was the responsible way forward. Should it have been 15 days? Should it have been one day? To me, that’s not a very big concern.”

Yates’ appearance also revived another controversial episode — her own firing as acting attorney general on Jan. 30, which came after she refused to defend Trump’s first travel ban targeting citizens from several Muslim-majority countries.

As she recounted her attempts to warn the White House about Flynn, her story came to an abrupt end. She told senators she did not know whether the White House took any actions after January to mitigate the problems she had flagged, given that she is no longer with the Justice Department.

“If nothing was done, then certainly that would be concerning,” she said.

Senate Republicans brought up Yates’ firing several times, with Texas’ senators — Republicans John Cornyn and Ted Cruz — pressing her to justify her refusal to defend an order by the president.

“In the over 200 years of the Department of Justice history, are you aware of any instance in which the Department of Justice has formally approved the legality of a policy and three days later the attorney general has directed the department not to follow that policy and to defy that policy?” Cruz asked.

“I’m not, but I’m also not aware of a situation where the Office of Legal Counsel was advised not to tell the attorney general about it until after it was over,” Yates responded. She said she learned about the executive order from media reports, even though she had met with McGahn earlier that day.

Yates also issued a forceful defense of her decision to resist the order, which was soon blocked by the courts.

“I did my job the best way I knew how,” she said. “I looked at this [executive order], I looked at the law, I talked with the folks at the Department of Justice, gathered them all to get their views and their input, and I did my job.”

Cruz also brought up the Hillary Clinton email scandal, asking Clapper what he would have done if someone who worked for him was forwarding emails to a non-government employee “spouse” — a clear reference to Clinton aide Huma Abedin and her husband, former Rep. Anthony Weiner.

“It raises all kinds of potential security concerns,” Clapper said in response to Cruz’s hypothetical.

Yates was first scheduled to appear in March before the House Intelligence Committee, but the session was canceled as relations broke down between Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) and his committee’s Democrats, who accused him of using his post to provide political cover for the White House. The DOJ also raised concerns about Yates’ scheduled appearance before the House panel, citing executive privilege.

Into the void stepped Graham, whose Judiciary subcommittee has jurisdiction over the FBI and parts of the DOJ. Graham is a staunch Russia hawk who has been one of the president’s fiercest Republican critics. He has vowed to get to the bottom of Russia’s meddling in the presidential election and any Trump campaign ties to Moscow.

Graham said last week the White House raised no objections to Monday’s hearing with Yates.



[POLITICO]