did we learn? dow you learn anything new today? well, i didn t know the details of sally yates meeting over at the white house. i thought that was pretty incredible. i wasn t aware of how ferocious clapper was and the major warning he gave us and the fact we have to educate our citizens and take this onto protect our democracy. and then finally, i thought that all of us ask questions about what really matters here. and that is that there was russian interference in the election. let s stop pretending there isn t and figure how to fix this going forward. and i don t think sally yates could have done a better job including how she went one-on-one with ted cruz. senator, thank you so much. thank you. let s bring in now ambassador r.j. woolsy. thank you, ambassador for coming on. sally yates testify today.
job. i want to bring in now my panel. jeffrey, let s talk about this. first, i want to ask you about president trump s tweet this morning. he said ask sally yates under oath if she knows how classified information got into the newspaper soon after she explained to the white house conscouncil. she answered with a similar statement saying she knew nothing about that. what s your reaction to that. this is clearly an attempt to intimidate her. it s on implicit threat to prosecute her for lying. and he s the president of the united states. he runs the justice department. you know, in an ordinary presidency or frankly in every other presidency the president would never threaten someone on the eve of their testimony in this way. but now, you know, we ve become
meetings and a phone call with white house council, don megan. still it took 18 days for them to fire him. why do you think it took so long? i don t know. it may have been the loyalty, they dismissed this, the organization. whatever it was, it was not right. because you have a situation, and i was the one who asked both director clapper and former attorney general yates. i said when you have someone lying on tape, you have them saying one thing on tape and lying to vice president, isn t that the kind of material that could be blackmail? and they both said definitively yes. and in fact these are the kinds of things russia has used on people in the past. here you have him on tape saying one thing and then lying to the media and lying to the vice president of the united states. it could be used for blackmail, and that is why they took it so seriously. and i have no idea why the white house didn t do the same. let me ask you before about
ten days now. november 10 obama warns trump about flynn. and then january 30 ag yates directs doj lawyers not to make legal arguments defending trump s executive order on immigration and refugees on travel ban. february 13, report flynn may be vulnerable to blackmail. and february 1 gts, flynn resigns as national security advisor. in those ten days, she warned the white house about lieutenant general flynn, told the department of justice not to enforce the president s immigration order. is there a bigger thorn in the president s side than sally yates right now? yeah, probably not at that time and probably not today. one thing i think in addition to
out? i don t think they is see it that way. because if you look at trump s twitter time line today, in all of the tweets today mike flynn s name was not brought up. when the majority of the meeting was supposed to be about what michael flynn knew and didn t know. so i think we walk away with this just knowing that supporters are focus on different stuff here. the hearings started out about flen, those centers tried to change it to the executive orders on travel. president trump couldn t mention general flynn in those tweets because general flynn underscores all of this smoke about russia. he wanted to go away from it and distract from it. and again, whether believe yates or not, she was unflappable in the face of these attack