Texas senators question Yates on Muslim travel ban
WASHINGTON — The hearing was about Russian interference in the 2016 election. The star witness was former acting Attorney General Sally Yates, who was fired by President Donald Trump in a dispute over the lawfulness of his abortive Muslim travel ban.
The blockbuster revelation: Yates had directly warned the White House that Michael Flynn, the Trump campaign’s top national security advisor, had lied about his contacts with the Russians and could be “blackmailed” as a result, compromising national security.
But there was another agenda in the packed hearing room apart from the allegations about Trump campaign ties to the Russians, an issue that has dogged the White House since its earliest hours.
Some Republicans on the Senate Judiciary panel, including both U.S. senators from Texas, turned to another line of questioning: Why had Yates overruled the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel and directed the department’s lawyers not to defend the president’s executive order restricting travel from a set of predominantly Muslim countries?
“I thought the Department of Justice had a long-standing tradition of defending a presidential action in court if there are reasonable arguments in its favor, regardless of whether those arguments will prove to be ultimately persuasive, which of course is up to the courts to decide, not you,” said Texas Republican John Cornyn.
True, Yates replied, “but in this instance all arguments have to be based on truth, because we’re the Department of Justice.”
Yates said she detected an unlawful discriminatory intent in the initial travel ban, which was struck down in court and eventually rewritten. “We are talking about a fundamental issue of religious freedom,” she said.
Texas Republican Ted Cruz took up the same attack, suggesting that Yates’ decision was based on partisanship, not principle. “There is no doubt the arguments you laid out are arguments we can expect litigants to bring,” he said, “partisan litigants who disagree with the policy decisions of the president.”
Yates, a nominee of former President Barack Obama, recalled that she had been pressed by Republicans at her 2015 confirmation hearings about whether she would go along with presidential directives that she thought were illegal or unconstitutional. “I said no, and that’s what I promised you I would do, and that’s what I did.”
Yates’ appearance was part of an ongoing probe by a Senate Judiciary subcommittee, one of several congressional investigations into alleged Russian meddling.
Cornyn, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said that while the public has a right to know, “this is not anything new — although perhaps the level and intensity and sophistication of both Russian overt and covert operations is really unprecedented.”