https://audioboom.com/posts/5897278-usa-today-s-kevin-johnson-breaks-down-today-testimony-from-sally-yates-on-michael-flynn
USA Today’s Kevin Johnson has been covering today’s testimony featuring former. Attorney General Sally Yates. Yates was fired by President Donald J. Trump after she refused to implement his travel ban, and many people in DC expect her to speak poorly about the current administration.
Sally Yates largely avoided the public spotlight when she served as deputy attorney general during the final two years of the Obama administration. That all changed — dramatically — in the 10 days she spent as acting attorney general during the infancy of the Trump administration. The career federal prosecutor from Georgia, a holdover from the Obama Justice Department, was abruptly fired Jan. 30 for refusing to defend the new president’s controversial travel ban in court.
Yet it is the extraordinary warning she delivered just four days earlier to the White House counsel’s office about former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn that is the reason for her testimony to Congress on Monday. It’s perhaps the most-anticipated congressional hearing since FBI Director James Comey publicly acknowledged last month that the bureau was investigating possible collusion between Trump campaign associates and Russian officials.
For the first time publicly, Yates is expected to recount to a Senate panel a Jan. 26 meeting in which she alerted White House Counsel Don McGahn that Flynn had lied to administration officials, including Vice President Mike Pence, about his conversations with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak before Trump’s inauguration. Those misrepresentations, Yates would maintain, made the former Army lieutenant general vulnerable to possible blackmail. Specifically troubling, according to officials who have previously described the communications, was that Flynn had talked with the ambassador about sanctions imposed by the Obama administration. Those conversations were secretly monitored by federal authorities, as are most communications involving foreign diplomats.
