AP source: Yates to testify on warning White House on Flynn

White House officials have said publicly that Yates merely wanted to give them a “heads-up” about Flynn’s Russian contacts, but Yates is likely to testify that she approached the White House with alarm, according to the person.

“So just to be clear, the acting attorney general informed the White House counsel that they wanted to give a ‘heads up’ to us on some comments that may have seemed in conflict with what he had sent the Vice-President out in particular,” White House press secretary Sean Spicer told reporters at a Feb. 14 press briefing.

Flynn resigned in February after published reports detailed Yates’s conversation with the White House. White House officials initially maintained that Flynn had not discussed Russian sanctions with Kislyak during the transition period, but after news reports said the opposite, they then admitted that he had misled them about the nature of that call.

“The issue, pure and simple, came down to a matter of trust,” Spicer told reporters.

Flynn was in frequent contact with Kislyak on the day the Obama administration slapped sanctions on Russia for election-related hacking, as well as at other times during the transition period, a U.S. official has said.

Yates’s scheduled appearance before a Senate Judiciary subcommittee, alongside former national intelligence director James Clapper, will provide her first public account of the conversation with the White House. It will also represent her first testimony before Congress since Yates, an Obama administration holdover, was fired in January for refusing to defend Trump’s travel ban.

She was previously scheduled to appear in March before a House committee investigating Russian interference in the presidential election, but that hearing was cancelled.

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Follow Eric Tucker on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/etuckerAP

Eric Tucker, The Associated Press

by Canadian Press

AP source: Yates to testify on warning White House on Flynn

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