WASHINGTON – U.S. Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) today questioned former U.S. Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates in a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing titled “Oversight of the Crossfire Hurricane Investigation: Day 2” and expressed concern about the politicization of the Department of Justice under Attorney General Bill Barr.

“So when you went to the White House on January 26, you had something serious to tell White House Counsel Don McGahn. You went to tell him, if I understand correctly, that the president's national security advisor, General Flynn, could be blackmailed because he was lying about the content of his conversations with the Russians. Is there any doubt in your mind that General Flynn lied about his conversations with the Russians?” Sen. Coons asked. “No, there is not,” Yates responded.

When Sen. Coons asked why lying to the FBI strikes at the very heart of the criminal justice system,  Yates responded that it is “the only way that the Department of Justice can go about its job.”

“Given your knowledge of the Flynn case and your 27-year career at Justice, were you surprised when DOJ moved to dismiss the case after General Flynn pled guilty to lying to the FBI?” Sen. Coons asked. “I was very surprised by that,” Yates responded.

Full video available here. Full transcript available below,

Sen. Coons: Thank you, Chairman Graham and Ranking Member Feinstein. Thank you, Ms. Yates, for your 27 years of service to the United States Department of Justice and for your testimony here today. Let me just begin at the outset with sort of a framing here. Do you have any doubt that Russia attacked the United States during the 2016 presidential election with the intention of changing the outcome or influencing the outcome of that election?

Ms. Yates: No. 

Sen. Coons: Do you have reason to be concerned that the Russians may in fact be trying to do that again for the 2020 election? 

Ms. Yates: I think all of us should be very concerned about that, Senator. As our intelligence community has tried to tell us. 

Sen. Coons: Let me go back to some issues that have been touched on before but make sure we have had a chance to explore them. Carter Page was never charged in the Russia investigation and out of the whole 448 pages of the Mueller report, only eight pages pertained to Carter Page, but there’s been some focus on it today. So just tell us briefly if you would, when did you learn of the errors in the Carter Page FISA application?

Ms. Yates: Long after I left office.

Sen. Coons: And when that FISA application reached your desk as Deputy Attorney General after several layers of departmental review, what were you looking for? When you reviewed that, what were you looking for and what was appropriate for you to be looking for? 

Ms. Yates: Thank you for that, Senator, because I would like to explain what the process is for FISA. I was looking to determine whether or not, given the facts that had been sworn to in the affidavit from the FBI, whether that met the legal standard for FISA. And you’re right, it’s not just several layers of review. There were seven different layers of review at the Department of Justice, and I would expect a similar number of layers of review at the FBI. There had been quite a good bit of back-and-forth before the original FISA was signed. It was about a month of back-and-forth between the national security division lawyers and the agents at the FBI. 

Sen. Coons: When you did ultimately learn that there were errors in that, did that strike you as inappropriate, uncalled for, in violation of practice and tradition?

Ms. Yates: Absolutely. And, as I’ve said, not only was it unacceptable, but I have great concern about how this impacts the department's credibility both with the FISA court and otherwise. And that’s why it is incumbent upon department lawyers and agents, not just in a high-profile case, but in any case, to work hard to be absolutely scrupulously accurate in every single document that is filed.

Sen. Coons: So when you went to the White House on January 26, you had something serious to tell White House Counsel Don McGahn. You went to tell him, if I understand correctly, that the president's national security advisor, General Flynn, could be blackmailed because he was lying about the content of his conversations with the Russians. Is there any doubt in your mind that General Flynn lied about his conversations with the Russians?

Ms. Yates: No, there is not. 

Sen. Coons: General Flynn, in fact, pled guilty to lying to the FBI. Some have called lying to the FBI, which is a felony by the way, a process crime. Could you explain why lying to the FBI in the context that we’re talking about here strikes at the very heart of the criminal justice system? 

Ms. Yates: Certainly, Senator. Well first, in connection with any investigation, the only way that the Department of Justice can go about its job is if people when they are interviewed by the FBI are truthful and candid and provide complete information. That's the only way to be able to sift through and figure out what the facts are and to be able to determine if charges should be filed. 

Sen. Coons: Given your knowledge of the Flynn case and your 27-year career at Justice, were you surprised when DOJ moved to dismiss the case after General Flynn had pled guilty to lying to the FBI? 

Ms. Yates: I was very surprised by that.

Sen. Coons: And let me ask a closing question if you could. Why was it important to interview General Flynn? What was the purpose that underlay questioning General Flynn? 

Ms. Yates: General Flynn had had conversations with the Russian ambassador, back-channel secret conversations neutering the sanctions to the U.S. government and had been covering it up, had been providing false information to the Vice President and others to put out publicly. We, we being the government, needed to know what was going on here. Was General Flynn acting on his own or was he working with others? Because the investigators needed to be able to figure out what the relationship was between the campaign and the Russians. Had General Flynn been honest, had he told them the truth in this interview, then the agents would have learned then what they only learned much, much later after he finally told the truth and that is that these were not off-the-cuff conversations that he was having with the Russian ambassador. But rather, that these were conversations that were carefully organized and planned with other members of the Trump transition. And that he had also been very careful to lie about and cover up even to the point of sending his deputy out when the news first broke of this to call the Washington Post and to give them false information, and to say that he had never discussed sanctions at all. The cover-up continued after that as he told lies to more and more people. 

Sen. Coons: Thank you, Ms. Yates. Thank you for your testimony and your service to our nation.

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