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Yates: White House was warned about Mike Flynn
The former acting attorney general testified that Trump’s national security adviser “was compromised” by Russia.
WASHINGTON — Former acting Attorney General Sally Yates testified Monday for the first time that she warned White House lawyers at least twice in January that President Donald Trump’s national security adviser, Michael Flynn, “could be blackmailed” by Moscow, may have violated criminal statutes and had misled Vice President Mike Pence about his dealings with Russian officials.
“We believed that Gen. Flynn was compromised,” Yates, a career prosecutor, told a Senate Judiciary subcommittee investigating Russia’s role in the 2016 election.
“To state the obvious, you don’t want your national security adviser compromised with the Russians,” she said. “You don’t want the Russians to have leverage over the national security adviser.”
Flynn, a retired Army three-star general, was forced to resign as Trump’s top national security aide 18 days after Yates first alerted the White House on Jan. 26, but only after news stories revealed the existence of a transcript of Flynn’s conversations with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. The diplomat’s calls were recorded as part of routine U.S. intelligence monitoring.
At issue is whether Flynn improperly indicated to Kislyak that the Trump administration would ease or reverse economic sanctions that President Barack Obama had imposed on Moscow in retaliation for Russian interference in the U.S. presidential campaign. Flynn denied doing so, and Pence later issued a similar denial.
Yates’ detailed chronology of two meetings and several calls with White House Counsel Donald McGahn about Flynn’s conduct conflicted with White House claims that Flynn was not ordered to resign immediately because she had only given a general “heads up” of a potential problem.
Her testimony adds to Flynn’s potential legal problems, outlining concerns at the highest level of the Justice Department that Flynn’s conversations with the Russian diplomat during the transition may have violated the law. He has not been charged with a crime.
It also highlighted the mounting pressure the White House faces from three congressional investigations into Russia’s alleged interference in the election. In March, the FBI confirmed it is conducting a separate counterintelligence investigation into whether any of Trump’s current or former aides improperly coordinated with Russian intelligence.
The hearing opened hours after it emerged that Obama had warned then President-elect Trump two days after the election in November against picking Flynn as his national security adviser.
Obama delivered the warning, which first was disclosed by NBC News, when he met Trump for 90 minutes in the Oval Office, according to a former Obama administration official.
Obama had not planned on saying anything about Flynn, the former official said, but he told Trump he should “think twice” about hiring him after they got into a conversation about personnel.
Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who also testified Monday, warned that Russia’s efforts to influence the election posed a threat to democracy and that the hacking and leaking of Democratic Party emails was a worrying taste of the future.
“I believe they are emboldened to now continue such activities, both here and around the world,” Clapper said. “And I believe they will continue to do so.”
Sen. Lindsey Graham, RS.C., who headed the hearing, said it was vital to get to the bottom of Moscow’s role in the election.
“The Democratic Party of 2016 were the victims this time. It could be the Republican Party in the future,” Graham said. “We’re all in the same boat.”
Yates, a career federal prosecutor, was named deputy attorney general by Obama in 2015. She served as acting attorney general for 10 days after Trump was inaugurated on Jan. 20.
Yates testified that she and a senior official in the national security division at the Justice Department met with McGahn, the top White House lawyer, on two consecutive days a week after the inauguration in a secure office at the White House to discuss statements by Flynn and others “that we knew not to be the truth.”
“We weren’t the only ones who knew of this,” Yates said. “The Russians also knew.”
Yates said that after FBI agents had interviewed Flynn on Jan. 24 she believed it was “critical that we get this information to the White House in part because the vice president was unknowingly making false statements to the American public. And we believed Gen. Flynn was compromised with regard to the Russians.”
Yates refused to go into detail about Flynn’s communications with the Russians and did not refer to transcripts of intercepted calls, noting that it was classified. In response to questions, she denied leaking any classified information about the case to the news media. But she laid out the timeline of her contacts with the White House, saying she had called McGhan two days after the FBI had interviewed Flynn to request a face-to-face meeting.
McGhan asked her whether Flynn might be subject to criminal prosecution, Yates recalled. She told him that the “underlying conduct,” referring to Flynn’s conversations with Kislyak, “was problematic.”