Obama appointee Sally Yates was acting attorney general under President Trump for just 10 days — from January 20, 2017 until January 30, 2017 — but by any measure they were consequential days. Even now, two issues from Yates’ brief tenure are still of interest to congressional investigators. One was the series of events that led Yates, in charge of the Justice Department, to reject the president’s executive order temporarily suspending the admittance into the United States of people from some Muslim nations. The second is Yate’s role in the FBI’s questioning, apparently on dubious premises, the president’s national security adviser, Michael Flynn, four days into the new administration — questioning that ultimately led to Flynn’s guilty plea in the Trump-Russia investigation.
Both are matters of great public significance and interest — and on both, the Justice Department is refusing to allow the Senate Judiciary Committee access to documents from Yates’ time in office.
On Feb. 23, 2017, Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Charles Grassley wrote to Attorney General Jeff Sessions asking for “all emails to, from, copying, or blind-copying Ms. Yates from Jan. 20, 2017, through Jan. 31, 2017.” Grassley also asked for all of Yates’ other correspondence from that period, plus records of her calls and meetings.
The reason Grassley cited — his committee has direct oversight authority over the Justice Department — was that Yates’ order to the Justice Department not to defend the president’s executive order cost the administration precious time as it prepared to fight the inevitable legal challenges. The Department did not have its facts together when a federal judge in Washington State demanded them, setting the stage for the judge to issue a temporary restraining order.
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But now, the Justice Department refuses to hand over any of Yates’ emails to the Senate committee with direct oversight authority. If the Department were serious about complying, it might ask for some limits on what has to be produced, and it’s likely the Senate would have gone along, or at least negotiated about what should be turned over. But the Department just gave a flat no. – READ MORE
[divider][/divider]Former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates on Monday said President Trump has taken his “assault on the rule of law to a new level” by demanding the Justice Department (DOJ) look into alleged surveillance abuses of his 2016 presidential campaign.
Yates, whom Trump fired last year after she refused to defend his travel ban targeting several Muslim-majority countries, warned that he crossed a new line by asking the department on Twitter over the weekend to investigate whether the FBI surveilled his campaign for “inappropriate purposes.”
“I think what we’re seeing here is the president has taken his all-out assault of the rule of law to a new level and this time he is ordering up an investigation of the investigators who are examining his own campaign. You know, that’s really shocking,” Yates said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”
“I know it was just a tweet but he did say something to the effect of, if I recall correctly, ‘I hereby order.’ And we saw the Justice Department respond to that,” Yates added. “I think [Deputy Attorney General] Rod Rosenstein is trying to strike a balance here between defusing the situation and also protecting the rule of law and the institutional integrity of the department.” – READ MORE
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