Lost in today’s disaster that is the Trump Administration is a headline that would on any other day be front page news…… Sally Yates is talking. For the first time since being fired she has now spoken with CNN and The New Yorker. Only a small piece of the CNN interview has been revealed online as CNN will play the full thing during Anderson Cooper 360. The New Yorker Piece is just a preview of the full interview due out in a week. From reading through both pieces I have a suggestion for all Committee members….. Employ a journalist to craft all question and follow up questions you wish to ask an individual. The New Yorker piece was way more informative then her testimony and this is just a small piece of her interview. I’m awaiting the full CNN piece. (block quotes from The New Yorker Piece)
The parts that caught my eye were the parts about unmasking which the GOP is obsessed with along with a few others.
Yates declined to talk about any classified information, including underlying evidence in the Flynn case, but it seems clear that Flynn’s name was not masked in the reports on the phone call that she saw. She said, “I oftentimes would get intel reports that included the name of the U.S. person. Not because I or anybody else had asked for it to be unmasked, but because that intelligence only made sense if you knew who the identity of the U.S. person was, and that’s an exception to the minimization requirements.” In other words, the authors of these intelligence reports included the names, because the reports could not be understood without them. She noted that there was one other common instance in which an American’s name would be included: “If it’s evidence of a crime.”
And about that blackmail stuff…..
That meant that Flynn was now “compromised” by the Russians, who knew that he had lied to the Vice-President and others and could use that to blackmail him. Yates went on, “Flynn is interviewed on the 24th. We get the readout on the 25th and have consult about impact on investigation, and I call first thing on the 26th.” That day, she had the first of two meetings with the White House counsel, Don McGahn, where she told him her concerns about Flynn.
Yates said that it appeared that McGahn did not know that the F.B.I. had interviewed Flynn until Yates told him, in their meeting the day after the interview.
So Flynn’s blackmail-ability was the fact that he had lied to the VP and others in the administration about sanctions and the Russians knew about it? Is there any more? What if the White House had instructed him to talk sanctions? This was still early in the investigation so who asked who or went rouge is still unknown as we are not given the answer in this interview. Is there any more to the “real leverage,” she references in the CNN interview? She noted in The New Yorker that she had to work with the FBI on her briefing so that not to compromise the already ongoing investigation so there appears to be more to this.
It appears Flynn did feel the need to hide his interview from the White House or at least from the White House council. It was reported elsewhere that Flynn had spoken to the FBI without a lawyer and the FBI had caught him lying. Is this the interview he decided he didn’t need to lawyer up?
So what did Yates expect to happen?
Yates said, “We had just gone and told them that the national-security adviser, of all people, was compromised with the Russians and that their Vice-President and others had been lying to the American people about it. We expected them to act.” She added, “We expected them to do something immediately.”
What did happen? Yates was canned and Flynn stayed on 18 days later. Turns out the FBI interview and the lying to the Administration didn’t phase them. Perhaps this is because they knew about the sanctions and he didn’t lie to Mike Pence and others. Perhaps they knew about his trip to the FBI and told him to lie. It isn’t too far of a stretch to believe the administration was lying to the public and IC and not each other now is it?