Former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates said in an interview broadcast Tuesday that President Donald Trump’s former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn “certainly” implicated a criminal statute in his interactions with Russian officials.
“There is certainly a criminal statute that was implicated by his conduct,” Yates said in an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper.
“You wanted the White House to act,” Cooper said.
“Absolutely, yes. We expected the White House to act,” Yates said. “We certainly felt like they needed to act.”
“Did you expect them to act quickly?” he asked.
“Yes,” Yates replied.
Yates said she doesn’t know why the White House concluded that Flynn’s conduct was problematic because he misled Vice President Mike Pence, and not in a legal sense.
“I don’t know how the White House reached the conclusion that there was no legal issue,” she said. “It certainly wasn’t from my discussion with them.”
In an interview with the New Yorker published Tuesday, Yates disputed White House press secretary Sean Spicer’s characterization of the warning she gave McGahn, which Spicer called a “heads-up.”
“I certainly never used that term,” Yates said. “And so I’m not sure where that came from.”
She said “it was clear” when she spoke to White House counsel Don McGahn that he was not aware the FBI had interviewed Flynn as part of its investigation.
“This was not something he already knew about,” she said.
Yates said there is “no playbook” for how to notify the White House about a “compromised” adviser who is also under investigation by the FBI.
“The good news is this doesn’t come up very often,” she said.
She also told the New Yorker that she did not expect her tenure as deputy attorney general to be as memorable as it was.
“I expected this to be an uneventful few weeks,” Yates said.
