Ten years ago, if I'd predicted that Sally Yates would one day be the U.S. Attorney General, most people in the know would have agreed. But if I said Don McGahn would one day be White House Counsel, I would have been laughed out of the room.
Yates was hired under the first President Bush to work for then-U.S. Attorney Bob Barr (yes, that Bob Barr). She got promoted in the Justice Department under Presidents Clinton and the second Bush and worked on many high-profile cases, including the Centennial Olympic Park bombing. She was appointed Deputy Attorney General by President Obama. During her Senate confirmation, she was famously asked by then-Senator Jeff Sessions, “if the views the President wants to execute are unlawful, should the Attorney General or the Deputy Attorney General say no?” Yates responded that, if she were in either position, she would “have an obligation to follow the law and the Constitution and to give independent legal advice to the President.”
Yates was confirmed by the Senate by a 84-to-12 margin, winning the support of a majority of Republicans—an unusual feat for an Obama appointee.
Don McGahn has traveled a rather different path. He has worked for people like former U.S. Representatives Tom DeLay and Bob Ney, both of whom left office in shackles. In fact, as the Center for Media and Democracy point out in their exceptional deep dive on McGhan’s career, for twenty-odd years this guy has been at, or near, the center of our nation’s worst campaign finance, ethics, and corruption violations.
I’m tempted to compare him to a mob lawyer, but I don’t think the mob would keep someone around who is this bad at steering his clients out of legal trouble.
This week Yates testified before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism and illuminated the world as to how she—then acting Attorney General—came to meet McGahn in a secured White House room on January 26 to discuss an urgent matter of national security.
The urgent matter was that President Trump's National Security Advisor, Michael Flynn, was a risk to national security.
Awkward.
Yates says she told McGahn that Flynn been lying to Vice President Pence and the rest of the Administration about his December 29 phone call with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak. Surveillance showed the phone call included illegal conversations about lifting sanctions that President Obama had just ordered on the Russians. And because the Russians knew Flynn was lying, they could potentially use that knowledge to blackmail him.
“To state the obvious, you don’t want your national security adviser compromised by the Russians,” Yates said at one point.
According to a report in The Washington Post, Yates had also told McGahn that Flynn had lied to the FBI, claiming that he had not discussed lifting Obama's sanction with the Russian Ambassador.
If Yates' testimony is accurate, McGahn knew Flynn had broken the law, that he had lied about it, and that he faced possible obstruction of justice charges for not being truthful with the FBI.
If all this is accurate, McGahn and the rest of the White House knew Flynn had broken the law by negotiating future sanctions with a foreign government, that he had lied about it, and that he faced possible obstruction of justice charges for not being truthful with the FBI.
The White House response? Crickets.
Four days after her meeting with McGahn Yates was fired, ostensibly for refusing to implement President Trump's “Muslim Ban” because it was unconstitutional. But Yates’s testimony paints a picture of relations with the White House fraying over the Flynn issue.
At another meeting with Yates, McGahn belligerently asked, “Why does it matter to the Department of Justice if one White House official lies to another?”
On February 13, The Washington Post ran a damning story that essentially made public what Yates had conveyed privately nearly three weeks earlier regarding Flynn's phone call with the Russian Ambassador.
Within hours of the Post’s story, Flynn was fired—apparently over the objections of President Trump, who in his first public appearance after the firing said, “General Flynn is a wonderful man, I think he's been treated very, very unfairly by the media, as I call it, the fake media in many cases.” The next day, Trump said that Flynn “didn't do anything wrong” and that he was “just doing his job.”
Continuing in the same vein, yesterday morning President Trump took to Twitter and accused Yates of being the anonymous source for the Post’s February 13 article:
Yates denied the accusation during the hearing. There is no known evidence to back up the President’s claims.
And, once again, it’s noteworthy that President Trump’s beef is not with the substance of the accusations against Flynn, but that this information was leaked and “fake media” ultimately forced his hand when it to came to firing Flynn.
That says a lot for a guy that got famous for firing people on a reality TV show.
President Trump’s “kill the messenger” (or at least smear the messenger) position also raises the possibility that this sub-scandal meshes with the larger Trump-Russia collusion scandal. Some wonder, for example, why a bird dog like Mike Flynn would, on his own, get in contact with the Russian Ambassador, and tell him to sit tight and not respond to Obama’s sanctions against Russia because his boss would lift them as soon as he was in office. Immediately after the phone call, the Russians announced they were not going to respond to the sanctions, and then Trump tweeted “Great move!” and called Putin “Very smart!” for delaying his response until President Trump came into office.
Why would a bird dog like Mike Flynn, on his own, get in contact with the Russian Ambassador, and tell him to sit tight and not respond to Obama's sanctions?
All this happened, according to Trump, without his knowledge that Putin’s “great move” came at the behest of the man he had tapped to be his National Security Advisor.
You know, I'm starting to feel more comfortable comparing Don McGahn to a mob lawyer.