the letters that were sent between attorneys for sally yates, the department of justice, attorneys for sally yates and the white house, it tells a different story. i managed to obtain these letters. there s a specific clause in these letters at the end where sally yates attorney has been asking about whether or not they can get permission to put out this privileged information in the intelligence committee. the attorney writes, quote, if we do not receive a response by monday, march 27th at 10 a.m. i will conclude the white house does not assert executive privilege over these matters. well, the white house didn t respond, so the attorneys did not hear back, therefore, the white house was giving defacto approval for sally yates to testify before that committee and to talk ab privileged information. now, then there s another narrative that s running around out there that devin nunes cancelled a hearing monday which was never really scheduled to begin with, so that the white
no. there s no connection between the president or the staff here and anyone doing anything with russia. and i think that the view here was great. go share what you know. so, no. that s why the washington post should be ashamed of how it handled this story. it was 100% false. the letters they published back up exactly what we re saying. that she was asked about this information. the attorney asked the doj. the doj said she had to ask the white house. they made it very clear, if you don t do, this we are going to go forward. we had no objection to her going forward. that s it. reporter: and again, sandra, when you look at these letters, you ve got one to the department of justice asking whether or not she could testify. the doj said you need to check with the white house because it s the president who, quote, owns that information. white house doesn t write back to the inquiry and so basically this is approval. that s what the white house is asserting today. sandra: all right, j
the story, that s for sure. congressman, thank for coming on with us. my pleasure. sandra: we do want to get more on this. michael warren, senior writer for the weekly standard. michael, you were listening to that. what did you make of that? look, i think the biggest problem with this whole issue is there are more questions than answers that we get. i think we should also separate two related but different issues here. there s the question of the substance of what chairman nunes is claiming in these intelligence documents, which is this question of, was this conversation, these conversations that were being monitored, were they between two foreign entitys? were they between a u.s. person and a foreign entity? which direction were they going? what was the intelligence community collecting? and whether or not the unmasking was inappropriate? that s one set of questions. the second set is more to what the congressman was talking about which is the process for getting this informat