The NPR Politics Podcast - Sally Yates Testifies

Episode Date: May 9, 2017

What we learned from the former acting Attorney General during Monday's hearing of a Senate Judiciary subcommittee. This episode: host/White House correspondent Tamara Keith, congressional reporter Scott Detrow, and political editor Domenico Montanaro. More coverage at nprpolitics.org. Email the show at [e-mail]. Find and support your local public radio station at npr.org/stations.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

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Keep up with all of NPR's political coverage at NPR.org, on the NPR One app, and on your local public radio station. All right, here's the show. It's the NPR Politics Podcast, and shout out to the son of one of our listeners in Russia. And it's convenient because we are here to talk about yesterday's Senate hearing on Russian meddling in the 2016 election, which featured the testimony much anticipated from former Acting Attorney General Sally Yates. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House for NPR. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover Congress. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, political editor. I feel like we should bring him on the podcast to interview him about Russian tactics. I have a

feeling that is not the voice of a Russian operative. They're a little closer to it than us. The hearing yesterday was before a Senate Judiciary Subcommittee, and it was officially titled Russian Interference in the 2016 United States Election. What was it actually about? Well, the hearing ended up being about two parallel things. And I think we're going to kind of talk into this two hearings, one room dynamic in a little bit. But a lot of the Democrats had a lot of specific questions for Sally Yates, who's a really key player in what we knew about Michael Flynn and his conversations with Russia's ambassador. And Michael Flynn is the former National Security Advisor. Former being key because he was only National Security Advisor for a matter of weeks. Sally Yates is a key figure in this. She was acting attorney general at the beginning of the Trump administration. She was an Obama holdover who was basically charged with running the Department of Justice until Jeff Sessions was confirmed as attorney general.

And we all first heard about Sally Yates when she was fired because she refused to defend that controversial immigration executive order. But she was here in person talking for the first time publicly about another equally dramatic moment that she had, where she went to the White House and basically said the Department of Justice has very serious concerns about Michael Flynn. There were like 360 questions in that hearing yesterday. Come to think of it, just looking at the title, because I didn't realize this was actually the title,

Scott, Russian interference into the 2016 United States election. I don't remember almost any questions about actual Russian tactics in this election. Well, that's come up in several other hearings. And one thing that was interesting was that members from both parties said that, hey, listen, there's basically bipartisan agreement at this point that Russia worked to interfere with the election. Lindsey Graham said something like, well, if Russia didn't interfere, we're wasting our time here.

Right. Well, bipartisan except for one person. Right. The president of the United States, who seems still sort of unconvinced based on his Twitter feed. Yeah. Okay, so Sally Yates. Let's go back to Sally Yates. A lot of people have been waiting to hear from her for a long time because she is this key figure. Very key figure. And we had learned about the basic gist of this conversation that we're about to walk through right now earlier in news reports, but we never heard directly from Yates.

And Yates had been scheduled to testify in front of the House Intelligence Committee. But that testimony was suddenly canceled right around a time where it was clear that the White House had serious concerns about what she was going to say. So there was a lot of anticipation about how much Yates was going to give details about what exactly she warned the White House about Flynn and why she did it. And it started out with the indication that it might be kind of an anticlimactic afternoon because in Yates's opening statement, she said, you know, I am bound by a lot of restrictions in terms of what I can talk about here. So you thought, oh, OK, we might not get many details. And that wasn't really the case at all. I mean, basically all I knew heading into this hearing is what I read in newspaper articles based on unnamed sources. Yeah. So let's set

the scene. This is the very first week of the Trump administration. And there have been, you know, a couple of weeks worth of stories of what exactly did Michael Flynn talk to Ambassador Kislyak about? Why did it matter? And Vice President Mike Pence had done a round of interviews saying, well, they didn't talk about sanctions, which Yates and others at the Department of Justice knew wasn't true. Yates basically indicated here, and she didn't give the details why, but I think we can fill in the blanks and assume that there's some sort of eavesdropping on the Russian embassy. If you watch the Americans, you know that, I guess. She said that the DOJ had a lot of concerns about what Flynn was saying and what Flynn was telling Mike Pence and others

just wasn't true. So she called Don McGahn, the White House counsel, and said, hey, we've got to talk. And we walked the White House counsel, who also had an associate there with him, through General Flynn's underlying conduct, the contents of which I obviously cannot go through with you today because it's classified. But we took him through in a fair amount of detail of the underlying conduct, what General Flynn had done, and then we walked through the various press accounts and how it had been falsely reported. We also told the White House counsel that General Flynn had been interviewed by the FBI on February 24th. And she meant January 24th.

Mr. McGahn asked me how he did, and I declined to give him an answer to that. And we then walked through with Mr. McGahn essentially why we were telling them about this. And the first thing we did was to explain to Mr. McGahn that the underlying conduct that General Flynn had engaged in was problematic in and of itself. Secondly, we told him we felt like the vice president and others were entitled to know that the information that they were conveying to the American people wasn't true. Okay, this is totally wild. Michael Flynn had an interview with the FBI. The National Security Advisor had an interview with the FBI four days after the inauguration. Right. And this is interesting because, again, and I think we'll talk about this later.

This is much more detailed than Sean Spicer said that this meeting was between Yates and McGahn. So they meet on the 26th. And this was at the White House. This is at the White House. McGahn says, OK, thank you very much. He goes. He consults with other people in the White House. He may have talked to President Trump about this. That's what the White House initially indicated. The next day, he calls Yates back, wants to talk to her again. And the crux of his question to her is, hey, why exactly does the Department of Justice care if one White House official is lying to another White House official? Why is this? Why

is this the DOJ matter that you thought was so serious? And so we explained to him it was a whole lot more than that and went back over the same concerns that we had raised with them the prior day, that the concern first about the underlying conduct itself, that he had lied to the vice president and others, the American public had been misled. And then importantly, that every time this lie was repeated and the misrepresentations were getting more and more specific as they were coming out, every time that happened, it increased the compromise. And to state the obvious, you don't want your national security advisor compromised with the Russians. Yeah, that's kind of a big deal.

Yeah, maybe we should just pause. Yeah, I mean, you know, I feel like a lot of people are numb to just how big of a deal that actually is, because, you know, there's been blind sourcing and some reporting, and we had confirmed this information along the way. But never have we seen before a veteran Justice Department official say out loud on the record under oath and in public that the president's national security adviser may have been compromised by a foreign adversary. And this person stayed in the job for the next 18 days. And we should just say that national security adviser is basically the hub in the middle of the wheel of the American national security apparatus. This is someone who meets with the president of the United States every day to go over security threats and sits in the basement of

the White House with other top officials kind of deciding what are America's priorities in the world? What are we doing here? What are we doing there? What are military options? I mean, it's a really serious job. And deciding what information gets to the president of the United States. In addition to this, President Obama apparently had warned Donald Trump in their Oval Office meeting during the transition that Michael Flynn was not somebody that Trump should probably bring on board. Trump ignored that. And I think a lot of what's going on here is politics. Donald Trump seems to think that if you're warning him about somebody who you don't like or who doesn't like you, that you're doing that because it's politically motivated. So back to this 18 days, that's a really long time between the White House being told by

Sally Yates and the Justice Department that the national security advisor had not been telling the truth. And then Flynn actually being dismissed and no longer being part of the administration. And the key thing that happened before Flynn was dismissed was that all of this that we're just talking about right now became public. The Washington Post was first with it. Other people followed up with different reports. And once all of this back and forth was out there publicly, that's when Trump asked for Flynn's resignation. But I don't know. The other key thing that happened is that three days after the second meeting at the White House, Sally Yates publicly stands up to Trump, says, no, I'm not going to enforce your executive order,

and is fired. So maybe, I don't think they're entirely wrong to think, well, maybe Sally Yates is someone who is just an Obama holdover and disagreed with us politically. So maybe she was being dismissed because maybe what she was saying about this other thing was dismissed because of what she was saying about the travel ban. Right. They, I think, would have had reason to just view her as an Obama person, even though she was a career Department of Justice employee. Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, was asked on February 14th in his briefing whether the president had been briefed by the White House counsel following that meeting with Yates.

And here's what he said. Immediately after the Department of Justice notified the White House counsel of the situation. The White House counsel briefed the President and a small group of his senior advisors. The White House counsel reviewed and determined that there is not an illegal issue, but rather a trust issue. During this process, it's important to note that the President did not have his Attorney General, Jeff

Sessions, who he trusts immensely, approved by the Senate. When the President heard the information is presented by White House counsel, he instinctively thought the general counsel, General Flynn, did not do anything wrong. And the White House counsel's review corroborated that. And I think who he trusts immensely may be key. Maybe they just dismissed this information. But I mean, if you go back, not just what Spicer said on the 14th, but what President Trump said a few days later at that big off the rails press conference that that got really contentious.

It was wide ranging. It was a unique press conference. We'll just say that President Trump kept going back and forth saying, you know, Flynn did nothing wrong. You know, and yet I asked him to resign. And the reason I asked him to resign was because he misled Mike Pence. But he's a good guy. Yeah. And then Mara Lyson asked, then why did you keep Mike Pence out of the loop? And Trump went back to saying because he did nothing wrong.

So I think Trump really has a lot of conflicting views as to whether he thought Flynn did anything wrong at all. And that's wavered back and forth several times. From a strict policy standpoint, Donald Trump during the campaign was basically saying President Obama had the wrong approach. We should get along with Russia. And it wouldn't be out of the realm of possibility that Donald Trump would say we'll lighten these sanctions. And again, you have to think about the political context because, you know, Trump for months had been saying we need to get along better with Russia. I mean, that was a clear part of the campaign. But the political ground around that shifted as there was more and more scrutiny about, hey, how much did Russia do to help you

get where you are? Suddenly, Michael Flynn saying, hey, don't worry about it, we'll cut you a break looks a lot different in mid-December after these initial reports come out from the outgoing administration saying Russia pretty aggressively did a lot to try and tip this election. And I think the issue that Sally Yates would bring up and brought up to Don McGahn, the White House counsel, was to say he's compromised when it comes to the potential to be blackmailed. Because if the Russians know that he gave bad information to the vice president, then they could blackmail him. If the Russians know and the vice president doesn't know. Right. That is definitely a piece of information she was saying could be held over his head and potentially harm national security and the Trump White House. And we sort of knew that going into this. So I guess what's the news?

I think, first of all, Sally Yates saying it herself is the news. You know, that's there's a lot of reasons why this story is hard to follow. But one of the reasons is a lot of this stuff, and this is probably the best example, you get preliminary reports, but you're not 100 percent sure. And then the reports that come out after that kind of backfill and color in the lines and you get a better understanding. And, you know, a lot of Trump supporters on social media have been saying things to me like, where's the proof? You know, because Sally Yates and James Clapper were Obama appointees. And Clapper is the other person who testified at that hearing. And James Clapper was the director of national intelligence, somebody who both sides of the aisle widely respected. And when they ask, where's the proof? Here's my answer. Who in that hearing,

which Republican said, actually, Sally Yates, James Clapper, your information is wrong. I think I doubt the information that you're bringing forward. Scott, correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think anybody in that hearing said to Sally Yates or James Clapper that they had the wrong information. Well, there was a lot of Republican pushback on Yates, especially for a couple of different reasons. And there was a lot of questioning and skepticism about did you leak this information? How did this meeting make its way to the... Yeah. How did this meeting make its way into the newspapers? Were your motivations political in terms of leaking information or getting into this unmasking, which I think we're going to dig

into a little bit. Yeah, we are going to get into all of that after the break. But bring that back for just a second. You said that there was a lot of pushback on Yates for whether or not she was a leaker and whether or not she unmasked folks. Yes. Did they push back against the substance? You're kind of questioning me like a senator now. Well, I'm just I mean, no, but seriously, right? I can't I can't I can't answer that question in this setting. You do not recall that involves classified. I actually don't even know which state to say you're the gentleman from. I'm an ambiguous person in terms. I can code switch on what state I'm from.

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Okay, we are back. And we are going to talk about unmasking and leaks and a whole lot of other things. But first, last night, approximately during the evening news, President Trump sent out a tweet. It says Director Clapper reiterated what everybody, including the fake media, already knows. There is, quote, no evidence of collusion with Russia and Trump. So what did he say in the hearing? And does the president's tweet have any relation to what was said in the hearing? Ish. OK, what he said in the hearing was it was a follow up question to an interview that he did, I believe was on Meet the Press, where where someone asked, you know, at the time you left the administration, was there any clear cut proof in front of your face

that there was direct collusion between Trump's world and Russia? And Clapper said no. They asked him again, and he said that was the case. But he also said something that was really key and kind of gets into just how segmented the world of intelligence and law enforcement is. He also said that he was totally unaware of the FBI investigation into that collusion until James Comey talked about it publicly in front of the House Intelligence Committee a month or so ago. So and Lindsey Graham said, wait a second, you were in charge of you're one of the people in charge of this investigation, this initial report, and you didn't know that this FBI investigation was going on? What is that about? What I don't get is how the FBI can have a counterintelligence

investigation suggesting collusion, and you as director of national intelligence not know about it, and the FBI signed on to a report that basically said there was no collusion. I can only speculate why that's so. There wasn't the evidence. If there was any, it didn't reach the evidentiary bar in terms of the level of confidence that we were striving for in that intelligence community assessment. I would love to know a more detailed answer as to why those lines weren't crossed, but I think it just gets into the segmentation of government. So that was interesting. And another thing that President Trump did not highlight in his tweets, unsurprisingly, was there was a moment in a question and answer session with Lindsey Graham in terms of Trump's business dealings. Let's hear that.

General Clapper, during your investigation of all things Russia, did you ever find a situation where a Trump business interest in Russia gave you concern? Not in the course of the preparation of the Intelligence Community Assessment. Since? I'm sorry? At all, any time? Senator Graham, I can't comment on that because that impacts an investigation.

It wasn't enough to put into the report. That's correct. Okay. It's an interesting pause. It was a very long pause. Yeah. Wondering if it's a pause with meaning. I mean, we know President Trump has tried to build businesses in Russia, build ties in Russia.

He held the Miss Universe pageant there a couple of years ago. And at one point, Donald Trump Jr. had said that they get a lot of their business dealings from Russia. We should say there's nothing necessarily wrong with doing business with Russia or talking to Russians or being in the same room as a Russian. I mean, I think a lot of Democrats are increasingly painting any sort of glancing contact with someone from Russia as like something that's totally scandalous. And you have to take it all in context. But like you can do business with people in another country. And that's something that happens frequently. The question is, you know, are there ties that are deeper than we realize? And and was there any sort of association or, you know, all this other collusion stuff we're talking about?

So, Domenico, earlier in the podcast, you said that it was almost like a tale of two hearings. Absolutely. We've been talking about the first half of the hearing that the Sally Yates half, the Michael Flynn half. What was the other half? Yeah. You know, what's fascinating about this, I went and I crunched the numbers just because it's stunning watching. It's because you're a nerd. Well, you want data to back up what you're going to say. You don't just want to like say, oh, it was a tale of two hearings. I mean, it felt that way in listening, because when you heard a Democrat talk, they talked about Russia and Mike Flynn and the White House's conduct. And when you heard a Democrat talk, they talked about Russia and Mike Flynn and the White House's conduct. And when you heard a Republican talk, they talked about unmasking and

this idea that an intelligence official might ask to see the name of an American who was picked up an incidental phone collection, for example. Well, the data bears it out. When I went and looked up the number of questions and coded the questions to see how many were asked, Democrats asked 142 questions on Russia, Flynn or White House conduct. Republicans asked 40. And some of them were very basic questions that weren't very probing. On leaks and unmasking, Republicans asked 65 questions. Democrats, a big fat zero on that. That was not their focus, I think it's safe to say. Perhaps they're not taking their cues from the president of the United States who tweeted yesterday morning, ask Sally Yates under oath if she knows how classified information got into the newspapers soon after she explained it to White House counsel. And they did. Have either of you ever been an anonymous source in a news report about matters relating to Mr. Trump, his associates, or Russians attempt to meddle in the election? No, absolutely not. Okay. And this has been the

case at basically every Russia hearing so far this year. It's like these two different tracks. I think the most glaring moment was that when Comey said there is an active MDI investigation underway, and Devin Nunes, who was the Republican who was then in charge of the House Intelligence Committee's investigation, he's not anymore. His immediate first question was not tell me more about this investigation. It was, let's talk about how these leaks are getting their way out into the public. And I just find it, just if we step back for a second, it's jaw dropping to me. I mean, you know, national security is supposed to be something that is pretty bipartisan. You know, you you collect information, you find the facts, you figure out what the threats are and what the threats aren't. Fake news is not supposed to factor in. Sure,

you want to know how did it get out there, but you wouldn't have overwhelming 90, 95 percent of the questions from one side focused on the substance and 90, 95 percent of the questions on the other side focused on the process. That is potentially dangerous if we're if if the two sides can't even agree on the danger and the facts. And I would say that the two sides probably don't agree on what is process and what is substance. But all right. So one of the things the Republicans are worried about is this idea of unmasking. And that's when, you know, you you're doing foreign intelligence.

We've talked about this before, but I'll just give a quick recap. You're doing foreign intelligence and you gather either you pick up an American on tape or under surveillance or people talking about Americans. Typically, the American's identity is masked. You don't know who it is. But these officials can ask under certain circumstances to reveal those names. So the Republican concern pushed by Donald Trump and echoed by a lot of Republicans in these hearings is that people in the Obama administration were asking who these people were just for political purposes to try and find out more about people in Trump's orbit. If that were the case,

that would be very scandalous. But Clapper kind of gave a long explanation in this hearing about why he has asked for people's names, why he has asked for unmasking, and why he argues it's a very legitimate thing to do. On several occasions during my six and a half years as DNI, I requested the identity of U.S. persons to be revealed. In each such instance, I made these requests so I could fully understand the context of the communication and the potential threat being posed. At no time did I ever submit a request for personal or political purposes or to voyeuristically look at raw intelligence, nor am I aware of any instance of such abuse by anyone else. Leaks have been conflated with unmaskings in some of the public discourse, but they are two very different things.

An unmasking is a legitimate process that consists of a request and approval by proper authorities as I've just briefly described. A leak is an unauthorized disclosure of classified or sensitive information that is improper under any circumstance. So Clapper said they unmasked nearly 2,000 names last year. That's a lot of names. We've got a lot of spying, I guess. There are also a lot of questions in this hearing that in some ways seem to be aimed at making Yates seem political or

highlighting her involvement in the travel ban and things like that. There were 26 questions asked by Republicans on the travel ban and only six by Democrats. And those were actually all follow ups based on Republican questions. Look at those charts. I'm so glad you've got that Excel sheet over there. Well, let's hear one of those 26 questions. This comes from Republican John Cornyn of Texas, and he's talking to Sally Yates about the travel ban. I voted for your confirmation because I believe that you had a distinguished career. But I have to tell you that I find it enormously disappointing that you somehow vetoed the decision of the Office of Legal Counsel with regard to the

lawfulness of the president's order and decided instead that you would counterman the executive order of the president of the United States because you happen to disagree with it as a policy matter. I just have to say that. I appreciate that, Senator. And let me make one thing clear. It was not purely as a policy matter. And in fact, I remember my confirmation hearing in an exchange that I had with you and others of your colleagues where you specifically asked me in that hearing that if the president asked me to do something that was unlawful or unconstitutional, and one of your colleagues said, or even just that would reflect poorly on the Department of Justice, would I say no? And I looked at this. I made a determination that I believed that it was unlawful.

I also thought that it was inconsistent with the principles of the Department of Justice. And I said no. And that's what I promised you I would do. And that's what I did. And she there was referring to her 2015 Senate confirmation hearing. And do you know who asked her those questions? No. Attorney, now Attorney General Jeff Sessions. That's true. Do you think the Attorney General has a responsibility to say no to the president if he asks for something that's improper? But if the views the president wants to execute are unlawful, should the attorney general or the deputy attorney general say no? Senator, I believe that the attorney general or the deputy attorney general has an obligation to follow the law

and the constitution and to give their independent legal advice to the president. So, look, independent legal advice based on what she thinks is constitutional. She got grilled on that point by other Senate Republicans. And John Cornyn asked kind of an odd follow up where he said, so you distinguish truth from lawful? And she said, yes, I do. Any other standout moments from this hearing, this half of the hearing? Well, Dominica, when we were listening together yesterday, you caught this and I missed it, that Yates said that she first learned when she was running the Department of Justice, she first learned about the travel ban from news reports that Friday night.

I met with White House counsel, best I can recall, about three o'clock in the afternoon on the 30th. And during that meeting, did they mention, anyone mention that this refugee order was about to come out to the acting attorney general of the United States? No. And that was one thing that was of concern to us is that not only was department leadership not consulted here and beyond department leadership, really the subject matter experts, the national security experts, not only was the department not consulted, we weren't even told about it. I learned about this from media reports. So you learned about it after the meeting at the White House Council from the media? Right.

Yeah, it's pretty fascinating because that was sort of a follow-up where, you know, someone said, how could you overrule the Office of Legal Counsel? Because the Office of Legal Counsel, it had gone to them first. And they're the ones who are supposed to give guidance to the White House on whether or not something is lawful. And they said, have you ever heard of a situation in which somebody, some attorney general overruled the Office of Legal Counsel. And she said, no, but I've also never heard of a White House going around the attorney general and not telling the attorney general about what they're about to put out. So that became a little bit of a thorny issue. And she was very poised, very under control for all of the session. And clearly,

she was holding her own when it came to those delineations. And basically at the same time that this hearing was happening, there was another hearing happening in the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals about the travel ban. And we will have more on that. And if there is any sort of a decision or anything else, we will have more on that in Thursday's roundup. Okay. So... We'll also have six more places that invented flight. Did you know New Jersey invented flight? Somebody else, somebody thought...

We get like... It says New Jersey. We've gotten like a dozen. I heard about Ohio and the North Carolina spat, but that's been going on a long time. And Brazil, but apparently everybody's... And France. And New Zealand. Connecticut.

Oh yeah, New Zealand. Okay, that's a wrap for us today. Keep up with us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram at NPR Politics. And as always, support the podcast by supporting your local public radio station. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House for NPR. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover Congress.

And I'm Domenico Montanaro, political editor. And thanks for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.