WILL FIRING OF FBI DIRECTOR COMEY REQUIRE ASSIGNING A SPECIAL PROSECUTOR

…The very strong and capable, former Acting  AG, Sally Yates

 

Will the acting Director or a new FBI Director stop the Russian investigations?  Stay tuned.

It appears that the testimony of the former Acting Attorney General, Sally Yates, not only brought up more questions than it answered, but did it also bring on the firing of the Director of the FBI?

 

We will get into the “more questions” part from Ms. Yates testimony later, but it’s looking more like “shades of Watergate,” when the president, (and his Attorney General that was supposed to be recused), both used bogus explanations for the timing of the firing of the FBI director James Comey.  That is especially a concern when the FBI is the agency in charge of the investigation of the president’s relationship with the Russians during the 2016 election and during the transition of power.

 

It was obviously a hurry-up firing, as instead of their waiting to deliver the letter, firing the FBI Director to his office in Washington, Comey had to hear of his firing via the cable networks while visiting an FBI recruiting event held in Los Angeles.  When the word of the firing was finally confirmed, it then wasn’t sure whether the Director would be allowed to return on the FBI plane that he had arrived in going to LA.  He was later told that, Yes, he could use the plane to fly home.

 

Obviously, there will be lots to discuss later about Director Comey’s dismissal, but the riveting testimony by Sally Yates seriously cast fresh doubts on Donald Trump’s presidential judgment.  And isn’t it interesting that the Director was fired, the very day after it was announced that subpoenas for people to testify in the Russian investigation had just been issued…?  Will the acting or a new FBI Director stop the Russian investigations?  Stay tuned.

 

Moving on, the former acting Attorney General Yates did disclose that, 18 days before Michael Flynn was fired, she had warned the White House Counsel, Donald McGahn that the national security adviser Flynn was “compromised by the Russians” and “could be blackmailed.”

 

Worried about the danger presented by the compromise, Yates said she moved with great “urgency.” The FBI had interviewed Flynn on Jan. 24^th and Yates got a detailed readout on the 25th from the agents who interviewed him. Early on the morning of the 26th, she had called McGahn and asked to come over to discuss a serious matter that was too sensitive to talk about over the phone.

 

In a secure room, Yates had revealed that Vice President Pence and the other White House officials were making false statements to the public regarding Flynn’s conversations in December with Sergey Kislyak. Intercepts reviewed by US intelligence officials showed that the national security adviser had indeed discussed sanctions, despite his repeated public and private denials.

(If you recall, all that the White House Chief of Staff, Reince Priebus, and the Press Secretary Sean Spicer had said, was that Ms. Yates had just given the White House a “heads up” on Mike Flynn, not that there were two separate acting AG visits and a long, detail phone conversation.)

 

Yates had explained that “the underlying conduct General Flynn had engaged in was problematic in and of itself,” but she said the bigger worry among senior Justice Department officials was that “the Russians also knew what he had done.  This was a problem because not only did we believe that the Russians knew this, but that they likely had proof of this information,” she told the Senate Judiciary subcommittee. “And that created a compromise situation, a situation where the national security adviser essentially could be blackmailed by the Russians.”

 

Then the next morning, McGahn phoned Yates and asked her to return to the White House. In her testimony, the president’s lawyer wondered whether Flynn could and would be prosecuted. He also wanted to see proof. “One of the questions that Mr. McGahn asked me when I went back over the second day was essentially, ‘Why does it matter to DOJ if one White House official lies to another White House official?’” Yates recounted in her testimony. “So we explained to him that … the misrepresentations being given by the White House were getting more and more specific. … Every time that happened, it increased the compromise and, to state the obvious, you don't want your national security advisor compromised with the Russians.”

 

Ms. Yates’s no-nonsense testimony underscored why the administration and its allies tried to block her from telling her story publicly until now.  You must remember, it was Rep. Devin Nunes that canceled a House Intelligence Committee hearing that had been scheduled, and Trump’s team tried to assert executive privilege against Yates before backing down under pressure.

Under oath, Yates also noted that she has a senior civil servant from inside the Justice Department’s National Security Division who will back her up as an outside witness.

 

As I had stated, Yates outlined a version of events that is counter to the public statements made by the White House, Chief of Staff, Reince Priebus.  All he had said was that Yates told McGahn. “Our legal counsel got a heads-up from acting AG, Sally Yates.  So our legal department went into a review of the situation,” Priebus had told this to CBS “Face the Nation”. “The legal department came back and said they didn’t see anything wrong with what was actually said.”

 

The meetings and phone calls Yates described could have been taken from a good spy thriller movie.

 

But let’s look at those questions I had said that the Yates testimony had brought up:

 

>>> What exactly did the president know and when did he know it? Sean Spicer had said on February 14th that, "Immediately after the Department of Justice notified the White House counsel of the situation, the White House counsel briefed the president and a small group of senior advisors. The White House Counsel reviewed and determined that there is not a legal issue, but rather a trust issue.”  But when was “immediately”?  Why did Flynn stay on as the National Security Advisor for another 18 more days, while sitting through important security meetings including a phone call between Trump & Putin?

>>> On Jan. 30, Yates let McGahn know that the intelligence he asked for was ready to be reviewed. Yates then got fired that same night for refusing to defend the president’s travel ban. Therefore, she could not say whether the White House counsel ever came to review the material.  Did McGhan or anyone from the White House review the intelligence data?

 

>>> Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) speculated that Trump might have been protecting Flynn primarily to prevent more people from falling. “We're trying to put a puzzle together here, everybody. And maybe, just maybe, he didn't get rid of a guy who lied to the vice president, who got paid by the Russians and who went on Russia Today because there are other people in his administration who met secretly with the Russians and didn't reveal it until … they were caught. That may be why it took 18 days, until it became public, to get rid of Mike Flynn, who is a danger to this republic.” After outlining this theory, Franken asked Yates: “Care to comment?”

“I don't think I'm going to touch that, senator,” Yates responded.

 

>>> “What contacts did Flynn have with the Russians during the 18 days the White House knew he’d been compromised but he remained as national security adviser?”  During Flynn’s tenure, he had several follow-up conversations with Kislyak, the Russian Ambassador.  At one point Flynn even proposed that the two have lunch. “The Russian Embassy called repeatedly to collect on that offer”, officials said, until Flynn was fired and then the calls stopped, so why was that?

>>> The real question is, would Trump have ever acted in firing Flynn if the Washington Post had not broken the story that Flynn was not telling the truth?  It appears no meaningful action was taken until The Post reported the details of the Flynn-Kislyak conversation that contradicted what he had told his West Wing colleagues. Even then, it took four more days for Flynn to go. In that time, he traveled with Trump to the Mar-a-Lago Florida White House for a bilateral meeting with the leader of Japan.

Who knows how long Trump would have tried to sit on what Yates had said if the truth had never come out via the press?

 

Since Flynn’s departure, the president has called Flynn “a good man” and characterized him as “the victim of a witch hunt”. He reportedly told staff to also stop feeding negative lines about Flynn to the press.

Sean Spicer has confirmed that Obama warned Trump about Flynn, but Spicer dismissed the warning as sour grapes from a sore loser.  When a reporter asked whether Obama’s comment “gave the president  any pause at all,” Spicer said, “No. he made it clear that Obama wasn't a fan of Flynn’s, and I don't think that should've come as a surprise, considering the role that General Flynn played in the campaign.”

And don’t forget, Trump seriously considered picking Flynn as his running mate last summer. Flynn even changed his position on abortion last July, to make himself a more palatable VP choice.

 

>>> James Clapper, also testified with Yates and was asked about a news report that Britain's intelligence service first became aware in late 2015 of suspicious interactions between Trump advisers and Russian intelligence agents.  The same story had also said multiple European allies had passed along information in the spring of 2016.

Asked if that is accurate, the former Director of National Intelligence (NIA) Clapper replied: “Yes, it is and it's also quite sensitive. … The specifics are quite sensitive.”

 

>>> By the way, what exactly did foreign intelligence agencies turn over to their American counterparts?

 

>>> Next question: “What is the current status of the FBI investigation into whether any of the president’s associates coordinated with the Russians to meddle in the presidential election?” James Comey had confirmed that the FBI is investigating the Russian government's efforts to interfere in the 2016 election, and that this includes investigating the nature of any links between individuals associated with the Trump campaign and the Russian government.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), asked Yates if Yates had any evidence that would suggest that anybody in the Trump campaign colluded with the Russian government intelligence services. “Senator, my answer to that question would require me to reveal classified information,” she said. “So I can't answer that.” She later to clarified, “Just because I say I can't answer it, you should not draw from that an assumption that that means that the answer is yes.”  Yates is a smart cookie.

 

>>> Why is Trump still so against assigning blame to Russia for the election interference? Multiple agencies and administration officials have taken a harder line on Russia since the chemical weapons attack in Syria.  However, the president has not followed suit. Asked last week whether he now believes the allegations of Russian meddling in the election, Trump still deflects the question. He said he’ll “go along” with the intelligence community’s consensus, but then he always adds that it “could have been China.” “Could’ve been a lot of different groups,” he told CBS’s John Dickerson.

If he understood how these US agencies, along with the ones in Europe, have all recognized the computer signatures of those trying to hack into the computers, he would understand why it is Russia.  But he is totally wrong when he says you have to “catch the hackers in the act” to know who is doing it.  That is totally false.

 

>>> Clapper said of the Russians. “They are now emboldened to continue such activities in the future, both here and around the world, and to do so even more intensely. … If there has ever been a clarion call for vigilance and action against a threat to the very foundations of our democratic political system, this episode is it.”

 

>>> Yates declined to say whether Flynn may face criminal charges related to what he said during his interview with the FBI in January. The retired general is already under investigation by the Pentagon’s inspector general over the $45,000 he accepted for appearing at a 2015 event in Russia and the $530,000 his former consulting firm was paid for work tied to the Turkish government. NBC News reported that the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) also didn't know that Flynn had been paid nearly $34,000 by the Russian financed network, Russia Today when they renewed Flynn’s security clearance in April 2016.

And this was not the extreme security clearance that was required for his role as the National Security Advisor.  Flynn was not seriously vetted by the Trump transition team as to the actual level of his security clearance.

 

These are just the obvious questions and assumptions that came up based on Sally Yates testimony to the Senate Committee.

 

The real follow on questions are, “Will whomever is named the next FBI Director continue to investigate whether the Trump administration or the Trump family colluded with the Russians, and will there be a special prosecutor assigned to conduct an independent investigation?”

 

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