Testimony on Flynn may contradict White House

Former acting A.G. expected to stress alarm she says she shared

WASHINGTON — Former acting Attorney General Sally Yates is expected to testify to Congress next week that she expressed alarm to the White House about President Donald Trump’s national security adviser’s contacts with the Russian ambassador, which could contradict how the administration has characterized her counsel.

Yates is expected to recount in detail her Jan. 26 conversation about Michael Flynn and that she saw discrepancies between the administration’s public statements on his contacts with ambassador Sergey Kislyak and what really transpired, according to a person familiar with that discussion and knowledgeable about Yates’ plans for her testimony. The person spoke on condition of anonymity.

The person said Yates is expected to say that she expressed alarm to White House counsel Don McGahn about Flynn’s conversation with Kislyak. White House officials have said that Yates merely wanted to give them a “heads-up” about Flynn’s Russian contacts.

Flynn was ousted weeks after the Yates conversation. White House officials initially maintained Flynn had not discussed Russian sanctions with Kislyak during the transition period, but after published reports said the opposite, then admitted he misled them about the nature of the communications.

Yates’ scheduled appearance before a Senate Judiciary subcommittee, alongside former National Intelligence Director James Clapper, will provide her first public account of the conversation with McGahn. Sally Yates is scheduled to testify next week to a Senate Judiciary panel. James Comey is to testify Wednesday to the committee that oversees the FBI. It will also represent her first testimony before Congress since Yates, an Obama administration holdover, was fired in January for refusing to defend Trump’s travel ban.

She had been scheduled to appear in March before a House committee investigating Russian interference in the presidential election, but that hearing was canceled.

On Wednesday, FBI Director James Comey will testify publicly before the Senate Judiciary Committee, a regular occurrence as the panel oversees the FBI. On Thursday, he is to speak behind closed doors to the House committee looking into the Russia issues.

Comey is expected to talk about the bureau’s investigation of potential coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia.

But there’s no guarantee Comey and his agency will fully lay bare those findings for the public, because such investigations rarely end in criminal charges that offer a full picture.

Some measure of information will certainly come to light through multiple congressional investigations. And political pressure will fall on Comey and the Justice Department to make public what investigators have learned.

“The vast majority of counterintelligence investigations will never see the inside of a courtroom,” said former FBI counterintelligence agent Asha Rangappa, an associate dean of Yale Law School. “The purpose of a counterintelligence investigation isn’t to find people, build a criminal case and put them in jail.”

The purpose, instead, is to root out spies.

But if the work concludes without criminal charges, a Justice Department inclined to keep intelligence matters secret will invariably confront demands to reveal its findings given the public interest in the investigation.

New Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein has declined to commit to such a disclosure, and hovering in the background is Comey’s decision to make detailed public statements after the FBI declined to recommend charges in its investigation of former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server.

“I am assuming that at the end of the inquiry that there will be an effort to apprise the public of what they’ve learned,” said Clinton campaign spokesman Brian Fallon. “Even if it never produces any criminal charges, there is a deep public interest in getting to the bottom of exactly what was the nature of the Russian intrusion into our election.”