acting attorney general sally yates. they had ordered the justice department lawyers not to legally defend trump s travel ban and moments ago we heard sean spicer responding to multiple questions on the white house statement which reads quote yates has betrayed the department of justice by refusing to enforce the legal order designed to protect the citizens of the p united states. if you have a legally executed order and the attorney general says i m not going to execute that, that clearly is a betrayal. let me bring in timothy hafe attorney for the western district of virginia, thanks for being here. thanks. you know yates yewell, but l
not legal. it s extremely rare that the president signs an executive order that has dubious this is the attorney general who stood up and said we cannot defend this law. i don t think this is a line of demarcation that s going set a precedent for career employees to refuse to do their jobs, this is a unusual circumstance. what this, water gate era, president nickxon and saturday night massacre and fired the special prosecutor handling the case, so paul cow wwin wrote th up. the sworn duty is to defend the
president and the the sacred principals of the document are being trashed by mr. trump. you hit on this before why you feel like sally yates did what she did but is this about the constitution or defending the president? this is about the constitution. again about fidelity to the rule of law. with all due respect to mr. cowen, the attorney general is not the president s lawyer, they can be removed at the discretion of the president as we saw last night but her responsibility is to do what she believes the constitution compels to do what is right to do what is fair, to do what is just and if the president wants her to do something not in her view fair, right and just it s frankly her obligation to say no, and again, that s what occurred last night.
list and found something that would agree with their of the law. again, the key point is that the attorney general it doesn t enforce anything, the attorney general defends the constitutionality or legality of executive orders and she did not believe she could send people the court to defend something that was unconstitutional. that s about her judgment about who her client is. in this discussion sean spicer was asked will this be a serious demarcation line for somebody in the system that doesn t believe this is justice in following through something he enact, what sort of benchmark does this set for others in the administration? i think the benchmark is you do what s legal but not what s
expertise. i thought the whole briefing was pretty pointed but just the adjective the now no longer acting sally yates, the defiance and betrayal. i think it was more about theatrics, sally yates knew exactly what she was doing. you just stand and watch, you re fired. i quit, you re fired. so donald trump played the role, so that s what was going on last night. i thought what got very contentious in the briefing though was sean spicer wanted to put the confusion around the on the media. around the executive order on to the media, for owning responsibility for trying to move beyond it. i almost felt like the country got a sense of how our phone calls are with the press