Sally Yates testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee on July 8th, 2015. (Getty)
Sally Yates today is testifying in front of a Senate subcommittee, and CNN reported today that Yates is expected to contradict the White House’s account of how Sally Yates and Michael Flynn left their positions in January and February. So ahead of Sally Yates’ account of this story, what has the Trump White House said about it?
Yates will reportedly say today that she told White House Counsel Don McGahn in January that Michael Flynn was lying when he said he did not discuss sanctions when speaking with Russian ambassador Sergei Kislyak during the 2016 election. Yates also reportedly told McGahn that Flynn could be vulnerable to Russian blackmail.
In February, Sean Spicer suggested that Sally Yates’ warning to Don McGahn was much less urgent than that; he simply said that Yates offered the administration a “heads up.”
“So just to be clear, the acting Attorney General informed the White House Counsel that they wanted to give a ‘heads up’ to us on some comments that may have seemed in conflict with what he had sent the Vice President out in particular,” Press Secretary Sean Spicer said in a press briefing.
Spicer did not say anything about whether Yates told McGahn that Flynn may have been compromised by Russia. Spicer said that the firing of Michael Flynn was all about the fact that he broke the president’s trust, with Spicer saying there were no legal issues here.
“The President asked [White House Counsel DonMcGahn] to conduct a review of whether there was a legal situation there,” Spicer said. “That was immediately determined that there wasn’t. That was what the President believed at the time, from what he had been told, and he was proved to be correct. The issue, pure and simple, came down to a matter of trust.”
Michael Flynn in his statement said the same: that he was regretful of the fact that he mislead the vice president.
“I inadvertently briefed the Vice President-elect and others with incomplete information regarding my phone calls with the Russian ambassador,” Flynn said at the time, according to CNN. “I have sincerely apologized to the President and the Vice President, and they have accepted my apology.”
The reason Sally Yates was fired as acting attorney general was unrelated to the firing of Michael Flynn; she was fired because she said she would not defend the Trump administration’s executive order on immigration.