Like Rod Rosenstein, former DAG Sally Yates says she wouldn't have signed Carter Page FISAs if she knew of the errors uncovered by the IG. "If I had known that it contained incorrect information, I certainly wouldn’t have signed it."
Also of note: Yates has been quite critical of Flynn. She said his call with Kislyak "essentially neutered" the Obama administration's attempt to deter Russia from election interference with sanctions.
She said again she was upset with how Comey dispatched agents to interview Flynn w/o coordinating with Justice. Asked if Comey had gone "rogue," she said "You could use that term, yes." But she says law enforcement had legitimate basis to interview Flynn.
Graham is repeatedly cutting Yates off, so it's been difficult for her to make her points. Graham is trying to make the case that the FBI was using the Logan Act as a flimsy pretense to investigate Flynn. Yates says: "That wasn’t the prism. It was a counterintelligence threat."
Under Feinstein questioning, Yates again is critical of Flynn's call with Kislyak. Not only did Flynn not "rebuke" Kislyak, she says, and "let him know that we will not tolerate their country trying to intervene and pick our president...he was making nice with them."
Yates also offers a robust defense of the Flynn prosecution, which AG Barr has sought to walk away from. Barr thinks FBI had no basis to interview Flynn; Yates says FBI had "to find out why he had these discussions, who else was part of them, & what was behind it."
Flynn's lies, she says, hindered that inquiry. Thus, they were material, a point prosecutors have to prove to win a conviction in a false statements case. She adds: "If Gen. Flynn didn’t think he was doing anything problematic, then he wouldn’t have had a need to cover it up."
Of Jan. 5 Oval Office mtg w/ Obama, Biden, Yates says: "This was about the national security implications of continuing to share sensitive information with Gen Flynn given what they had learned about his backchannel discussion with the Russian ambassador to neuter the sanctions."
She insists "That meeting was not about an investigation at all." (Republicans have suggested Obama, Biden were meddling in/pushing for investigation of Flynn, a political rival.) "That is something that would have crossed the line," Yates says.
Given how angry Yates was at Comey for sending agents to talk to Flynn, it's remarkable how robustly she's defending the FBI's basis for doing so & even their tactics. She notes agents asked "open ended" questions, essentially giving him lots of leeway to tell the truth...
"Interviewing Gen. Flynn was really right at the core of the FBI’s investigation at this point to try to discern what are the ties between the Trump administration & the Russians," she says. She's angry Comey didn't loop her in, but agrees 100% Flynn should have been interviewed.
Yates on President Trump: "I don’t respect the manner in which he has carried out the presidency."
Yates says it's a "red herring" to dwell on whether there was an open investigation into Flynn in January 2017. "You didn’t need that to go interview Gen Flynn," she says. In other words, whether Flynn had that bureaucratic "subject" or "target" designation was of no consequence
