Donald Trump fired Sally Yates just hours after her final White House meeting about Michael Flynn
Prior to yesterday’s Senate testimony by former acting Attorney General Sally Yates, it was already publicly known that Donald Trump had fired her just a few days after she first notified his White House that National Security Adviser Michael Flynn had been compromised by Russia. But based on Yates’ public testimony, we now know that the two events coincided much more closely.
Donald Trump’s position all along has been that he fired Sally Yates due to her unwillingness to defend his unconstitutional Muslim ban executive order. This already looked suspicious because she had just gone to White House Counsel Don McGahn a few days earlier to inform him that Flynn was at risk of being blackmailed by the Russians. But Yates testified yesterday that she ended up having three different meetings with McGahn over the matter, and that the last of them was on the same day she was fired.
This means that Trump fired Yates just hours after her third and final White House meeting about Michael Flynn. That makes it more difficult than ever for Trump to believably claim that he fired her in good faith solely over the Muslim ban – an assertion which was already made suspect after federal courts ruled that the ban was indeed unconstitutional, just validating Yates’ legal interpretation. But instead of moving on, Trump and his White House are now trying to create even more of a misleading narrative about Yates.
White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer held a public briefing today and tried to pin Sally Yates as being a partisan Democratic operative. But in reality, Yates was first hired to the U.S. Attorney’s office under Republican President George H.W. Bush, and then rose through the Department of Justice ranks under two subsequent Democratic Presidents and one subsequent Republican President, establishing that her career has been anything but partisan. Help fund Palmer Report
