A panel discussion on CNN Monday afternoon highlighted how unusual it was for President Donald Trump to publish a tweet attacking former acting Attorney General Sally Yates mere hours before she testified in Congress.
“He’s the President of the United States and the former acting attorney general is about to testify under oath before the United States Congress and you tweet, ‘Ask Sally Yates under oath if she knows how classified information got into the newspapers soon after she explained it to the White House counsel,'” CNN’s John King said.
“I started, before I got into covering politics all the time, I used to cover the courts a lot. A lawyer would call that witness intimidation,” he added.
“Completely,” CNN reporter Dana Bash said in response. “Look, I think we have all been kind of desensitized in some way to his tweets and to his statements that are so out of the norm. This is beyond out of the norm. This is inappropriate. For the President of the United States to be this aggressive with somebody who used to work for him, who is coming before the United States Congress with sworn testimony hours later, is beyond the pale. It just is.”
King emphasized that it was unusual for Trump to make such a plea in public.
“To go public like this is striking,” he said.
Trump’s tweet about Yates came before she was expected to inform a Senate Judiciary subcommittee that is investigating Russian meddling in the U.S. election that she’d warned White House Counsel Don McGahn about former national security adviser Michael Flynn discussing U.S. sanctions with a Russian official.
Watch a clip via CNN:
