wilwheaton:

This administration is the most corrupt in my lifetime, and the Congress is failing to due its constitutional duty to defend the country from enemies foreign and domestic.

Congressional Republicans are a disgrace, and for a group of people who use patriotism as a cudgel to silence dissent, their hypocrisy is unequaled. 

March 28, 2017 1:09 p.m.

In sum

• While briefly acting as an interim US attorney general, Sally Yates warned WH counsel that Michael Flynn “had misled his superiors about his preelection conversation with the Russian ambassador to the United States.”  It wasn’t until weeks later that that info was leaked and Flynn resigned.

• Yates was recently invited to testify to these events in front of the House Intelligence Committee, related to their investigation on “Putin government’s alleged interference in the 2016 election”

• She accepted and then got hit with a warning from the White House/DOJ that basically the events she was being asked to testify to were “client confidences” or subject to “presidential communications privilege,” and so anything in her testimony would have to be cleared by the White House.  

• Last Friday, Yates’ lawyer basically replied, “ha! yeaaaah, right.” Yates still intends to testify.

• A national security blogger Marcy Wheeler agues that the only way that Yates testimony would be covered under presidential communications privilege is if “Trump is claiming that he was involved in hiding this information from Mike Pence.”  From what I gather, since Yates can only testify to events involving WH staff who were party to Flynn’s act of lying, unless Trump was somehow an actor involved in Flynn’s lies, he has no case to claim that Yates can’t testify without his consent.

• Also on Friday, Yates “informed government officials that her testimony would probably contradict some statements made by the Trump administration.” 

• House Intelligence Committee Chair Devin Nunes canceled Yates’ hearing that very same day.

• On Tuesday, the White house issued a statement that the report of the above “is entirely false.”  “The White House has taken no action to prevent Sally Yates from testifying and the Department of Justice specifically told her that it would not stop her and to suggest otherwise is completely irresponsible.”

• To which the Washington Post replies, “Ostensibly, the White House does not consider warning Yates that her testimony would be illegal — absent the president’s consent — as such an action.”

“The fact that Nunes appears [emphasis theirs] to have canceled a hearing — that the White House wished to prevent — has further undermined the GOP lawmaker’s standing with Democratic committee members.”

Trump Asked for Veto Power Over Sally Yates’s Testimony at Russia Hearing