Two former Obama administration officials will testify Monday in a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Russia’s influence in the 2016 election, giving both Republicans and Democrats a chance to advance their very different theories on how the government behaved on the issue of Russia and President Trump’s election.
Testifying today are former acting Attorney General Sally Yates, and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.
Yates became the acting attorney general in late January to run the Justice Department while the Trump administration submitted its Cabinet nominations to the Senate for approval. But she did more than just run out the clock. Yates was a key part of the scandal that rose up quickly around Trump’s appointed national security adviser Mike Flynn.
Yates warned members of the Trump administration that Flynn hadn’t been truthful in saying his conversation with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak hadn’t discussed the sanctions placed on Russia by former President Barack Obama in late December. She also warned the Trump administration later that Flynn could be vulnerable to blackmail, and was at the center of another controversy in which numerous sources accused the White House of attempting to keep Yates from testifying to the House Intelligence Committee.
Democratic questioning of Yates is likely to center on those last two elements: problems related to Flynn, and whether there was an attempt to bar her from testifying.
But Republicans are expected to press Yates on how she became aware of Flynn’s conversations, and issues related to the “unmasking” of Trump’s team. Unmasking is when the redacted names of U.S. citizens identified in the surveillance of foreign officials are revealed.
Republicans may also ask Yates about the reports that Obama’s national security adviser Susan Rice was making numerous requests for the names of some people in surveillance reports to be unmasked in the latter part of 2016. Rice has said she never unmasked anyone for political reasons.
Clapper takes the national stage again after having already been a part of the release of a report in January on Russian involvement in the 2016 election.
Democrats are expected to focus on Clapper’s assessment of Russia, and could ask him to go into further detail on how Russia might attempt to influence other free elections around the world. Just before the French election over the weekend, there were reports that bogus documents had been purposefully mixed in with real documents in the release of hacked emails.
Clapper said his investigation found “no evidence” of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, but Democrats could press him on whether he has a new view on that given the many recent revelations over the past two months.
Republicans are certain to press Clapper on issues of surveillance and unmasking, and will likely try to dig deeper on the effect of a rule from the Obama administration that allowed for wider distribution of intelligence documents, such as the one that sunk Flynn.
