Acting AG says she warned White House about Flynn
Yates: Blackmail of ex-national security adviser was possible
USA TODAY WASHINGTON Days before she was fired as acting attorney general, Sally Yates was so troubled that former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn had misled Vice President Mike Pence about his communications with a Russian ambassador that she met twice at the White House to discuss Flynn’s possible vulnerability to blackmail and exposure to criminal charges, she told a Senate panel Monday.
For the first time publicly, Yates recounted to a Senate panel a Jan. 26 meeting — and a follow-up session the next day — in which she alerted White House Counsel Don McGahn that Flynn had lied to administration officials about his conversations with Russia’s to the U.S. before Trump’s inauguration, prompting McGahn to ask whether Flynn should be dismissed.
Yates said she offered no opinion on Flynn’s continuing service but conveyed the “urgent” nature of her concerns.
“You don’t want a situation where a national security adviser could get blackmailed by the Russians,” Yates told a Senate judiciary subcommittee.
Flynn’s contacts with the ambassador, Sergey Kislyak, involved discussions about sanctions imposed on Russia by the Obama administration, according to officials who have previously described the communications. Those conversations were secretly monitored by federal authorities, as are most communications involving foreign diplomats.
Pence had said he had been assured by Flynn that the subject of sanctions was not raised in the Kislyak conversations.
Yates, citing the classified nature of how the communications were obtained, declined to elaborate on the intercepts. But she said the anxiety about Flynn’s actions was so great within the Justice Department that members of its national security division were consulted, as were other intelligence officials across the government.
“Compromise was the No. 1 concern,” Yates said, referring to the possibility that Russian officials, aware that Flynn had misled the White House, could blackmail him by threatening his career.
Shortly after Yates’ warnings were made public, Flynn was forced to resign, ending the shortest tenure of any president’s national security adviser.
Before that, four days after Yates’ first meeting with the White House counsel, President Donald Trump fired the career federal prosecutor for her actions on a separate matter. A holdover from the Obama administration, Yates had instructed Justice lawyers not to defend Trump’s travel ban.
Some Republicans at Monday’s hearing seized on that deambassador cision, suggesting that her actions were partisan. Yates defended the directive, saying that there were “constitutional concerns” about the language of the order and that she was “not convinced that it was lawful.”
The specter of Yates’ testimony was not lost on Trump, who early Monday fired off two tweets distancing the administration from Flynn while suggesting that Yates might have leaked information about her actions related to the former national security adviser.
“General Flynn was given the highest security clearance by the Obama Administration — but the Fake News seldom likes talking about that,” Trump said. “Ask Sally Yates, under oath, if she knows how classified information got into the newspapers soon after she explained it to W.H. Council (sic).”
Trump and Obama administration officials also confirmed Monday that Obama advised Trump during their post-election White House meeting not to hire Flynn.