Sally Yates
In 2015, she was appointed United States Deputy Attorney General by President Barack Obama. Following the inauguration of President Donald Trump and the departure of Attorney General Loretta Lynch on January 20, 2017, Yates served as acting United States Attorney General for 10 days.
Trump dismissed Yates for insubordination on January 30, after she instructed the Justice Department not to make legal arguments defending Executive Order 13769, which temporarily banned the admission of refugees and barred travel from certain Muslim-majority countries (later to include North Korea and Venezuela) on the grounds that terrorists were using the U.S. refugee resettlement program to enter the country. . . . Yates stated the order was neither defensible in court nor consistent with the Constitution. Although large portions of the order were initially blocked by federal courts, the Supreme Court ultimately upheld a revised version.
However, her most visible role so far was in forcing Michael Flynn's removal as National Security Adviser during the brief period when she was Acting Attorney General. According to Wikipedia,
Acting Attorney General Sally Yates made an "urgent" request to meet with newly-appointed White House Counsel Don McGahn. She met with him on January 26 and again on January 27. She informed McGahn that Flynn was "compromised" and possibly open to blackmail by the Russians. Yates told McGahn that Flynn had misled Pence and other administration officials about the nature of his conversation with the Russian ambassador. She added that Flynn's "underlying conduct", which she could not describe due to classification, "was problematic in and of itself", saying "it was a whole lot more than one White House official lying to another."
Yates's name has now reappeared in connection with internal divisions within the Obama Justice Department and Comey FBI over whether to investigate Hillary Clinton over a pay-to-play scheme involving the Clinton Family Foundation.
"Shut it down!" then-Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates is quoted as demanding in the detailed timeline of political impediments that agents in New York City, Little Rock, Ark., and Washington D.C. reported.
The agents tried to get the help of federal prosecutors to determine whether or what crimes occurred while Hillary Clinton served as Secretary of State, most notably, because at that time, her family foundation solicited hundreds of millions of dollars from foreign and U.S. interests with business before her department.
According to the link, an FBI investigation in Washington
was opened “as a preliminary investigation, because the Case Agent wanted to determine if he could develop additional information to corroborate the allegations in a recently-published book, Clinton Cash by Peter Schweizer, before seeking to convert the matter to a full investigation.”
. . . the FBI’s Little Rock and New York investigations “included predication based on source reporting that identified foreign governments that had made, or offered to make, contributions to the Foundation in exchange for favorable or preferential treatment from Clinton.”
Despite that evidence, the FBI timeline stated that DOJ “indicated they would not be supportive of an FBI investigation” on February 1, 2016.
FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe was the primary figure involved in limiting investigations day-to-day, although he was almost certainly doing the bidding of Yates and Comey.
[T]he FBI’s Criminal Investigative Division reiterated that “all overt investigative steps related to the CF investigation” would “require” McCabe’s approval, “with the exception of speaking to open CHSs” during a February 22, 2016 meeting. The inquiry was further hobbled during the meeting when the FBI offices were “directed not to open or recruit any new CHSs, and no additional overt investigative steps were authorized.”
. . . Paul Abbate, then the assistant director in charge of the Washington Field Office, described McCabe as "negative," "annoyed," and "angry" about the Clinton Foundation cases, with McCabe saying that "they [the DOJ] say there's nothing here" and with McCabe asking "why are we even doing this?"
The investigations cited at the link from Inspector General Horowitz and Special Counsel Durham seem to conclude that McCabe exceeded his authority, presumably from Comey and Yates, to whom he reportedL:
Horowitz’s report in 2018 detailed multiple instances in which McCabe “lacked candor” with Comey, FBI investigators, and inspector general investigators, including while under oath, about his authorization to then leak sensitive information to The Wall Street Journal in late October 2016 that revealed the existence of the FBI investigation into the Clinton Foundation (while not revealing how McCabe had put the inquiry in leg-irons for nearly a year).
The Horowitz report concluded “the evidence is substantial” that McCabe misled investigators “knowingly and intentionally” about leaking to the media. Comey said he did not permit McCabe to tell the media, and Horowitz wrote that McCabe’s actions were “designed to advance his personal interests at the expense of Department leadership” and “violated the FBI’s and the Department’s media policy and constituted misconduct.”
Nevertheless, the story is now emerging that Comey himself leaked classified information to the New York Times via his confidant Daniel Richman.
Richman, who became friends with Comey during their time working together in the Southern District of New York, admitted to speaking with New York Times reporter Michael Schmidt, in particular.
At one point in early 2017, Richman had a discussion with Schmidt, who mentioned unspecified classified information and “knew more about it than he did,” an FBI memo obtained by The Post said.
. . . While the memo, first reported by Just the News, didn’t specify the classified information discussed, it previously said Comey mentioned to Richman that the bureau had “weird classified material related” to then-US Attorney General Lorretta Lynch.
Lynch infamously met with Bill Clinton on the tarmac in 2016, just over a week before Comey announced he wasn’t recommending charges against Hillary Clinton.
. . . “Richman understood the information about Lynch was highly classified and it should be protected.”
The FBI memo in question comes from the bureau’s “Arctic Haze” investigation, a probe into the leaking of classified information that began in August 2017 in response to the “unauthorized disclosure of classified information in eight articles published between April and June 2017.”
So whether Andrew McCabe was or wasn't exceeding his own authority, he appears on one hand to have been thwarting investigations consistent with the expressed or unexpressed wishes of both Yates and Comey, while Comey in particular was leaking independently of McCabe. It's hard for me to avoid thinking McCabe's role was to keep Comey's and Yates's fingerprints off the frammis.Someone, maybe Strzok, maybe McCabe, maybe even Lisa Page, could get a really good deal if they were to flip for the prosecutors.
