Following hours of testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday regarding her involvement in the General Flynn fiasco as well as her rather unprecedented refusal to defend President Trump's travel ban, Judicial Watch has filed a FOIA lawsuit against the Department of Justice seeking all of Yates' emails from her time at the DOJ. Per Judicial Watch:
Judicial Watch announced today that it has filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Justice for emails of former Acting Attorney General Sally Yates from her government account. The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of Justice (No. 1:17-cv-00832)).
The suit was filed after the Justice Department failed to respond to a February 1, 2017, FOIA request seeking access to her emails between January 21, 2017, and January 31, 2017.
Yates was appointed by President Obama as U.S. Attorney in northern Georgia and was later confirmed as Deputy Attorney General. In January 2017 she became acting Attorney General for President Trump.
“Between her involvement in the Russian surveillance scandal and her lawless effort to thwart President Trump’s immigration executive order, Sally Yates’ short tenure as the acting Attorney General was remarkably troubling,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “Her email traffic might provide a window into how the anti-Trump ‘deep state’ abused the Justice Department.”
As Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton points out, Yates is suspected of potentially playing a role in the unmasking of Flynn in NSA intelligence reports and/or of leaking classified information to the media regarding his alleged ties to Russian officials. That said, Yates denied all such accounts yesterday under oath:
Former DNI Clapper, former acting AG Yates deny ever being anonymous source in press reports on Trump or associates https://t.co/VO91R4PRlb pic.twitter.com/bk2RkRnNgm
— ABC News Politics (@ABCPolitics) May 8, 2017
Meanwhile, on the travel ban, Yates testified that she instructed the DOJ to not defend the executive order because it was, in her opinion, "unlawful" and "unconstitutional".
Sally Yates said she made determination as acting AG that Pres. Trump's travel ban was "unlawful": https://t.co/Okz2bwUl4f pic.twitter.com/Pc7uiUTNxt
— CBS News (@CBSNews) May 8, 2017
That said, Senator Kennedy quickly took her to task on those claims by asking very simply: "who appointed you to the United States Supreme Court?"
Senator Kennedy asks Sally Yates, "who appointed you to the United States Supreme Court?" https://t.co/N2XqdigO37 https://t.co/duaEAZYAko
— The Lead CNN (@TheLeadCNN) May 8, 2017
Unfortunately, no one managed to ask Yates the most obvious question regarding the travel ban which is, how can it possibly be discriminatory against Muslims if it in no way targets the overwhelming majority of Muslims living outside of the handful of countries banned under Trump's EO? As we noted previously, only 12.5% of the world's Muslims live in the seven countries on Trump's immigration ban list...
But those are just silly facts...