Sally Yates (Getty)
Former U.S. Attorney General Sally Yates is testifying in Senate today on the role Russia played in the U.S. presidential election.
It’s the first time Yates will be seen publicly since she was fired by President Donald Trump in late January.
Yates will field questions from the Senate Judiciary Committee following reports that she had warned the Trump administration that former national security advisor Michael T. Flynn had close communications with Russian ambassador to the U.S., Sergey Kislyak. It was later reported that Flynn may had illegally taken payments from Russian entities.
The much-anticipated Yates hearing starts at 2:30 p.m. EDT and can be watched live in the stream below:
A new report that surfaced hours before Yates was set to testify in Senate revealed that she wasn’t the only person to warn the Trump administration about Flynn’s connections. Former President Barack Obama reportedly told Trump he wasn’t a fan of Flynn when the two had a meeting in the Oval Office on November 10, 2016 and advised him not to give him a role in his administration.
Trump took to Twitter hours before Yates was set to appear in Senate to discredit her background and accuse her of leaking classified information.
Ask Sally Yates, under oath, if she knows how classified information got into the newspapers soon after she explained it to W.H. Counsel.
The White House has long lobbied for Yates not to testify in front of Congress, as The Washington Post reported. Letters obtained by The Post said that the Trump administration had tried to block her from testifying because the things she would speak about were covered by the “attorney-client privilege or the presidential communication privilege.”
Yates was fired by Trump on January 30 — just over a week into his presidency — after she advised the Department of Justice to not abide by his executive order barring immigration to the U.S. from predominantly Muslim countries.
“At present, I am not convinced that the defense of the executive order is consistent with these responsibilities, nor am I convinced that the executive order is lawful,” Yates said in a letter to the Justice Department’s lawyers.
Yates was appointed and confirmed to the position of deputy attorney general in May 2015 under Obama. Two years later in January 2017, she accepted an offer from the Trump administration to be the “acting” attorney general until the successor to Loretta Lynch — Jeff Sessions — was confirmed by the Senate.