Sally Yates just handed Democrats new ammo for going after Trump

[babylonsister]

https://www.vox.com/world/2017/5/9/15584650/sally-yates-michael-flynn-senate-testimony

Sally Yates just handed Democrats new ammo for going after Trump
Her testimony showed why the Michael Flynn scandal isn’t going away.
Updated by Zack Beauchamp@[e-mail] May 9, 2017, 10:30am EDT

snip//

The famous question from the Watergate scandal was: “What did the president know, and when did he know it?” In the case of the Flynn scandal, we know what the White House knew. The question is what did they do about it, and when did they do it?

As a number of Democrats on the committee pointed out, there is no public evidence that Flynn’s access to the president or classified information was restricted in any way. In fact, there’s evidence to the contrary: After Yates’s warning to McGahn, Flynn sat in on a long phone call between President Trump and Vladimir Putin, and participated in a sensitive meeting with Japanese President Shinzo Abe on North Korea’s nuclear program.

In fact, there’s no evidence that Yates’s warning was even the cause of Flynn’s firing. Flynn was only dismissed after the news of his lie was reported by the Washington Post, which made keeping him on politically untenable. And even after firing him, the president seemed unwilling to admit that Flynn did anything wrong.

"Gen. Flynn is a wonderful man. I think he has been treated very, very unfairly by the media, as I call it, the fake media in many cases," Trump said in a February 15 press conference. "And I think it is really a sad thing that he was treated so badly."

This all suggests that the White House did not take a very serious issue — the potential compromise of the national security adviser by the Russians — seriously at all. It suggests, as Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) outright said, that “Michael Flynn might still be sitting in the White House” if it weren’t for the Washington Post.

This means the Flynn scandal is far from over. Now attention will turn to whether the White House did anything — like restricting Flynn’s security clearance or opening an internal investigation — or whether they simply ignored the risk that Flynn posed to US national security. And if they did nothing, the question becomes why? Did the Trump White House just not care if Russia had a way of getting access to some of the US’s most sensitive classified information? And if so, why?

Democrats on the committee seemed fascinated by this question (Republicans, not so much). It’s hard to imagine it going away anytime soon.

[PJMcK]

1. Great article!

Thanks for the heads-up, babylonsister.