It is hard to locate when President Trump first declared war on the government establishment, but the story may well begin on the night of January 30th. Three days earlier, Trump, prodded by his most ideological aides, had issued an executive order banning travellers from seven Muslim-majority countries. On the 30th, Sally Yates, the acting U.S. Attorney General, refused to defend the order, saying that she was not convinced that it was lawful. Trump reacted with a fury not seen in the White House since the Nixon era.
Yates had been working in her office at the Department of Justice, several blocks away. A twenty-seven-year veteran of the department, she knew that she would not occupy the office long. Jeff Sessions, a Republican senator from Alabama, was Trump’s choice to be Attorney General, and although he was likely to face some tough questioning from the Senate Judiciary Committee, he was also almost certain to win confirmation.
Yates heard a knock at her door. “I remember it vividly,” she told me. “They came to the door of my office.”
A senior Trump appointee in the Justice Department handed her a letter. It said, “I’m informing you that the president has removed you from the office of deputy attorney general of the United States.” A few minutes later, the White House press secretary, Sean Spicer, issued a corrosive statement regarding the action: “Ms. Yates is an Obama Administration appointee who is weak on borders and very weak on illegal immigration. It is time to get serious about protecting our country.”
Sally Quillian Yates, who is fifty-six, spent more than two decades as a federal prosecutor in Georgia before being named a U.S. Attorney and then the Deputy Attorney General by President Obama. She and her husband, Comer, live in Atlanta, but she keeps a modest apartment in Washington, where I met her for her first interview since her career at the Department of Justice ended. Yates was composed, disciplined, and sharp-witted as she spoke about her brief time in the Trump Administration, but she showed more emotion when we came to the moment of her firing.
“Intellectually, I absolutely knew that this was a strong possibility,” she said. “But I didn’t want to end my service with the Department of Justice by being fired. Of course, I was temporary—I understand that. But, after twenty-seven years, that’s not how I expected it to end. Knowing something intellectually, and feeling it emotionally, as I am demonstrating right now, are kind of two different things.”
After her dismissal, Yates went home to Georgia, and refused all media requests. When she returned to Washington, more than three months later, it was to appear before a Senate Judiciary Subcommittee about her ten tumultuous days in the Trump Administration. Yates testified about the travel ban, and about the potentially criminal conduct of General Michael Flynn, the former national-security adviser, who was forced to resign after lying about conversations with the Russian Ambassador. In her Georgia lilt, Yates explained that she had repeatedly warned the White House about Flynn, contradicting the Trump Administration’s story. She recalled that she told the White House counsel, Don McGahn, that “the national-security adviser essentially could be blackmailed by the Russians.”
Yates faced nine senators, eight of them men, who at times lectured her about her responsibilities.
“Are you familiar with 8 U.S.C. Section 1182?” Senator Ted Cruz asked.
“Not off the top of my head, no,” Yates replied.
“It is the binding statutory authority for the executive order that you refused to implement, and that led to your termination. So it—it certainly is a relevant and not a terribly obscure statute.”
Cruz read a portion of the law, which vested the President with the authority to “suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens as immigrants,” and gave a self-satisfied grin.
“I am familiar with that,” Yates told Cruz. “And I’m also familiar with an additional provision of the I.N.A.”—the Immigration and Nationality Act—“that says no person shall receive preference or be discriminated against an issuance of a visa because of race, nationality, or place of birth, that I believe was promulgated after the statute that you just quoted.” She added that, beyond the text of the statute, she had to judge whether Trump’s executive order was in violation of the Constitution.
The video clip of Yates’s retort became a social-media sensation. During the subsequent round of questioning, Cruz was conspicuously absent.
Before her firing, few people had heard of Sally Yates, but she became a hero to the Trump opposition. Hundreds of people sent her letters of thanks, which are stacked in her home in Atlanta. “ ‘Humbling’ is the only word I can think of,” she said. “I’ve never been generous enough to write somebody else a letter who did something that didn’t personally involve me.” After her Senate appearance, many young women—and plenty of men—made Yates their social-media avatar, as Yates’s twenty-five-year-old daughter proudly informed her.
Sally Caroline Quillian was born in Atlanta in 1960, into a family of lawyers and Methodist ministers. “Those were the two career options,” she told me. Her father, J. Kelley Quillian, served as a judge on the Georgia Court of Appeals from 1966 to 1984. His father, Joseph Dillard Quillian, who was born in Georgia in 1893, practiced law for thirty-eight years before becoming a judge, serving on the state supreme court from 1960 to 1966. When he died, in 1968, his official court obituary praised him for having “an insatiable desire to follow the letter of the law in all opinions that he wrote or participated in.”
Yates’s paternal grandmother, Tabitha Quillian, was one of the first women to be admitted to the Georgia bar, in 1934. She had studied under a lawyer, without telling her husband. According to family lore, he learned about it when he found her name in the newspaper one morning. Yates told me, “My grandfather turned to her and said, ‘Look at that! There’s another Tabitha Quillian who passed the bar.’ ” At that time in the South, it was unheard of for women to practice law, so she worked as her husband’s legal secretary and then played a similar role for her two sons. Yates was impressed by her willingness to speak out. “Mama, as we called her, was not one to hold back her opinion on things,” she said.
Yates’s mother, Xara Terrell, was also a Georgia native and the daughter of a lawyer. She and Kelley Quillian had two daughters, Sally and her sister, Terre, who is now a conservative talk-radio host in Birmingham, Alabama. Yates went to college at the University of Georgia, where she studied journalism. “When I graduated from college, my thought was: I don’t want to be a lawyer. I don’t want to marry a lawyer. And I don’t even really want a lot of lawyer friends,” she said. “I am a lawyer. I married a lawyer. And I’ve got a lot of lawyer friends. So much for knowing what you’re going to do.” Thinking that she might want to work on Capitol Hill, she spent a summer in Washington as an intern for Senator Sam Nunn, a Democrat from Georgia. After college, she moved to Washington and worked as a staff assistant for Representative Jack Brinkley, a conservative Democrat, also from Georgia. The experience helped change her mind about studying law. “I loved the process of being in the center, where it felt like the important decisions are being made about our country,” she said.
After working for Brinkley, Yates attended the University of Georgia School of Law, receiving a full scholarship and graduating in 1986. That year, her father, who had long suffered from depression, committed suicide. Yates told me, “Tragically, the fear of stigma then associated with depression prevented him from getting the treatment he needed.”
After law school, Yates spent three years in private practice at King & Spalding, in Atlanta, a prestigious firm founded in 1885. When she was there, it was run by Griffin Bell, Jimmy Carter’s Attorney General. Bell was a family friend, and he became her mentor. “He had a strong moral compass,” she told me. “He was very clear about keeping the Justice Department separate from other parts of government, particularly the White House.”
Yates did not find her work at King & Spalding especially satisfying; she described most of it as “two companies fighting over money.” Bell, knowing that she was “itching for a cause,” found a pro-bono case for her. The client was Lovie Morrison Jones, an African-American woman in her nineties. Decades before, Jones had inherited ninety-two acres in rural Barrow County, Georgia, from her family, who were among the first black landowners in the area. Because Jones distrusted the courts, she never filed the deed, and kept it tucked in her shirt as she tilled the land. In the early eighties, she learned that several acres, mostly swampland, had been sold without her knowledge, and that a developer planned to build a subdivision there.
Yates was then in her late twenties. “I had absolutely no idea what I was doing,” she told me. But she remembered an obscure doctrine from law school. “There’s an old theory called adverse possession that you learn in property law,” she said. “If you use property openly and notoriously for seven years with a claim of right, then it’s yours. The theory being ‘I’m putting everybody here on notice: This is my property. You got a problem with that, you need to say something.’ ”
Yates found a woman, Ruth Chancey, who had seen Jones working the disputed piece of land. But Chancey was from a moonshining family that was part of the Dixie Mafia, a criminal organization in the South, and she wasn’t eager to testify. “Her son had been convicted for murder,” Yates said. “My recollection is that he killed a man and dropped him into a well, so Chancey didn’t have a lot of warm feelings for the court system.” But Chancey finally agreed, and she helped convince the jury that the land belonged to Jones.
That jury left a deep impression on Yates. “They were so proud of what they were doing, because they were taking really seriously their oath and their obligation to uphold the law and to apply the law to the facts,” she said. “I still have the image of them coming back in. I was just ready to throw up, I was so nervous at that point.”
Soon afterward, Yates had dinner with friends who had worked in the U.S. Attorney’s office, and she realized, she said, that, with the exception of Jones’s case, “I didn’t have the sense of purpose behind my practice there that they were describing.” She sought advice from Bell, who encouraged her to join the Justice Department.
Bob Barr, then the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Georgia, and later one of the most conservative anti-Clinton Republicans in the House, hired her in 1989. “I remember her very vividly as an outstanding candidate for an Assistant U.S. Attorney position,” Barr told me. “I was very pleased to hire her and never regretted it.”
One of the Assistant Attorneys in the office cautioned Yates against taking the job, telling her that, coming from a silk-stocking firm, she might not be ready to deal with criminals. But Yates went on to prosecute a series of high-profile cases. One, in 1994, implicated some of Atlanta’s most prominent officials, including Ira Jackson, its first black city councilman, in a corruption scheme at Hartsfield International Airport. Douglas A. Blackmon, who covered the case for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and has known Yates for decades, recalled, “She was facing off in this gigantic corruption trial not just against the city’s most powerful figures but against a dream team of the highest-paid criminal-defense attorneys in Atlanta.” Yates won the case, sending Jackson to prison, along with the brother-in-law of a federal judge. “That was awkward,” she told me. The judge was a close friend.
Perhaps her most famous case was against Eric Rudolph. He was charged with bombing the Atlanta Olympics in 1996, a lesbian bar in Atlanta in 1997, and two abortion clinics in 1997 and 1998, killing three people. Rudolph’s bombs were “grisly, ugly things,” Yates recalled, with “two-inch nails laid head to toe that are circling all the pipes.” He was finally apprehended in 2003, when a police officer found him eating from a dumpster in a small town in North Carolina.
Rudolph had stolen a large cache of dynamite, which he used to detonate the bombs, and much of it remained missing. One day, Yates received a call from Paul Kish, an attorney for Rudolph. As Yates recalled, “Paul told me, ‘He’s got about two hundred and fifty pounds of dynamite that is buried in a national forest, but it’s not very far beneath the surface.’ ” The forest was popular with Scout troops, and if a camper pounded a tent stake into the dynamite it could detonate. Kish said that Rudolph had agreed to tell Yates where the dynamite was if she took the death penalty off the table.
“We’re thinking, What do we do here?” Yates said. “If you’re going to have a death-penalty case, this is a death-penalty case. But, on the other hand, are we going to put people’s lives at risk?” She decided to make the deal. Alberto Gonzales, who was George W. Bush’s Attorney General at the time, approved her decision.
Rudolph gave directions over the phone to Kish, who gave them to Yates. She then relayed the information to federal agents, who went into the forest. “The agents were very leery,” Yates said. “They thought, We may very well be being sent out to this place where his real goal is not for us to find his dynamite but to kill us.” The agents found the dynamite and safely detonated it, leaving behind enormous craters. Rudolph pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life in prison.
In 2009, the Obama White House wanted to nominate Yates to be the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Georgia. Her record of prosecuting local Democrats presented a problem, however. Representative John Lewis, the celebrated civil-rights leader and Georgia Democrat, told me, “The four African-American members, and three of the members in particular, that made up the delegation at the time had raised some concerns, and part of it had to do with her prosecution of the former mayor of the city of Atlanta, Bill Campbell.” Yates said that she heard about these concerns, and, after running into Lewis on a flight, she asked him for a meeting. Afterward, Lewis said, “I threw all of my support behind her.” The Senate voted unanimously for her confirmation.
As a U.S. Attorney, Yates pursued several significant white-collar criminal cases, among them a Ponzi scheme in which some hundred and fifty people were defrauded of more than twelve million dollars; Allergan’s fraudulent promotion of Botox as a treatment for headache, pain, and juvenile cerebral palsy; and an international hacking ring that stole nine million dollars from more than two thousand A.T.M.s in less than twelve hours.
In September, 2014, Eric Holder, then the Attorney General, announced that he was leaving the Justice Department. Obama nominated Loretta Lynch, a U.S. Attorney from Brooklyn, to replace him, and Yates as the Deputy Attorney General. That November, Obama announced several executive orders that would have protected more than eight million undocumented immigrants. The Republican Congress revolted, claiming that the President’s actions were illegal. Lynch told me, “It came out while I was in the middle of my confirmation process. I wasn’t involved in it at all, but it became a focus of my hearing.”
Yates started out as acting Deputy Attorney General under Holder, in January, 2015. At the hearing to officially confirm her for the position, in March, 2015, Republicans, including Jeff Sessions, asked her whether she would stand up to President Obama if he defied the law. “They were all over me about ‘Look, you’ve got to be independent. You don’t work for the President,’ ” Yates said. “They’re absolutely right. You’ve got to be able to say no to the President. You’ve got to make your own decisions about what’s lawful and constitutional.”
The vote on Yates was 84–12. One of the “No” votes was from Sessions, whom Trump chose to lead his Justice Department.
Obama and Holder had worked together on criminal-justice-reform efforts, including reductions in sentencing for nonviolent drug offenders. After Holder’s departure, Obama relied on Yates to lead those efforts, Holder told Blackmon, who is a senior fellow at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center and is co-writing a book with him. Holder recalled that, when he was Attorney General, Yates had accompanied him to a meeting at the White House, and Obama came away impressed. After Holder left the department, Obama, who still solicited his advice, continued to ask him, “ ‘What does Sally think?’ ”
Some career prosecutors were skeptical of the reform efforts, including the Smart on Crime program, which Holder started in 2013, and which urged prosecutors to allocate fewer resources for low-level convictions. Lynch recalled, “Many senior Assistant U.S. Attorneys initially said, ‘What is this? Are you saying that I was doing something wrong for doing my job before?’ ” Cecilia Muñoz, the director of Obama’s White House Domestic Policy Council, told me that Yates successfully reframed the issue: “She argued there is something to be gained by actually focussing your resources where they are going to make the biggest difference if we have better sentencing policy.”
During Obama’s final two years in office, he intended to work through an enormous backlog of commutation requests, and Yates was his primary contact. Valerie Jarrett, Obama’s senior adviser, told me, “He looked to Sally to do that last review before the recommendations were sent over to the White House counsel.” Yates spent hours on the phone with Obama, who eventually commuted more than a thousand sentences.
Several Obama Administration officials said that, by the end of Obama’s second term, Yates was effectively running the Justice Department. A former senior Justice official said, “A lot of people by default looked to Sally and to her folks if you needed to get a decision made.” Another senior Obama Administration official said, of Yates, “The reality was that the President saw her as more committed and more effective to his agenda than he did Loretta. That’s just a fact.”
This January, before Trump was inaugurated, the incoming and outgoing leaders of departments held a four-hour exercise in emergency planning on the White House grounds. Lynch was out of town, so Yates represented the department, sitting next to Sessions as they role-played responses to events such as a terrorist attack or an Ebola outbreak. Sessions made it clear that Trump wanted Yates to stay on as acting Attorney General. “I expected this to be an uneventful few weeks,” she told me.
Around that time, Yates reviewed an intelligence report that would have profound consequences for the Trump Administration. On December 29th, President Obama had announced sanctions against Russia, in response to its interference in the Presidential election. That day, Michael Flynn, Trump’s designated national-security adviser, had spoken on the phone to Sergey Kislyak, the Russian Ambassador. In Yates’s Senate testimony, she said that Flynn’s “conduct” during the call was “problematic.” Flynn reportedly discussed the sanctions with Kislyak, a possible violation of the Logan Act, which prohibits civilians from intervening in a dispute with a foreign government. (Yates declined to comment on Flynn’s conversations with Kislyak or on any other classified information.)
Yates faced an extremely difficult decision: Was it more important to protect the F.B.I.’s investigation, which included the question of whether Trump officials had colluded with the Russians, or to notify the White House that Flynn’s conduct was potentially criminal? Yates consulted with James Comey, then the F.B.I. director. She said, “We wanted to do it as quickly as we possibly could. Yet we also wanted to be respectful of how a notification like that might impact the F.B.I.’s underlying investigation.” Yates added, “There’s no playbook for this. The good news is, this doesn’t come up very often.”
As a U.S. Attorney, Yates was part of a group that had developed a risk-assessment policy for prosecutors, and she described the situation in those terms. “It might be that you’ve got an agent who’s sitting on a wiretap and he finds out that they’re threatening a witness,” she said. “What do you do there? If you go tell the witness, you’re going to blow the wire, but it’s more important that you tell the witness than that you keep the wire.”
In most cases, Yates said, “you try to find a way of balancing it, of figuring out timing and how you do a notification.” With Flynn, the balance shifted after he lied to White House officials and they repeated those claims. On January 15th, Vice-President Mike Pence said in an interview with CBS that Flynn and Kislyak hadn’t discussed sanctions. On January 23rd, Sean Spicer gave a summary of Flynn and Kislyak’s conversation, and he, too, denied that there had been any discussion of sanctions. At this point, Flynn was in what Yates called a “compromise situation.” The Russians knew that he had lied, and he was vulnerable to blackmail.
On January 24th, the Justice Department sent F.B.I. agents to interview Flynn. Yates was briefed about the session the next day. I asked her if the agents believed that Flynn had lied to them, which would be a federal offense. “I can’t answer that,” she told me.
On Thursday, January 26th, Yates, accompanied by a career official from the Justice Department’s National Security Division, went to the White House to give a warning about Flynn. They arrived in a car with her security detail, and passes that allowed them to go directly to the office of the White House counsel, Don McGahn. Yates said that, after outlining what Pence and others had said about Flynn’s conduct, she “then walked him through how we knew it was untrue and what our evidence was.” She told me that McGahn did not appear to know that the F.B.I. had interviewed Flynn two days earlier. (He may have been playing dumb. Last week, the Times reported that, on January 4th, the F.B.I. notified McGahn of a separate investigation involving payments made to Flynn by an agent of the Turkish government.) McGahn “got that it was serious,” Yates said. He asked if Flynn should be fired, and Yates declined to offer an opinion. (McGahn did not respond to requests for comment.)
On Friday, McGahn invited Yates and the Justice Department official back to the White House. He asked how serious the potential violations were, and how likely it was that Flynn would be prosecuted. Yates recalled that she said, “That misses the point of why we’re telling you about all this.” She told me, “We had just gone and told them that the national-security adviser, of all people, was compromised with the Russians, and that their Vice-President and others had been lying to the American people about it.” McGahn asked whether taking action against Flynn would interfere with the F.B.I.’s investigation. “You should not worry about that,” Yates said. “It’s not going to impact the investigation. Flynn has already been interviewed. We’re telling you this so you can act.” Finally, McGahn asked that the F.B.I. make the evidence against Flynn available to him.
Yates told McGahn that she would have the Flynn materials for him by Monday morning. She left the White House, stopped at the Justice Department to pick up some documents, and continued on to the airport. She was returning to Atlanta for a dinner honoring a camp for children with serious illnesses and disabilities, which her husband has supported for years. On the way to the airport, she received a call from her deputy, Matt Axelrod. “You’re not going to believe this, but I just read online that the President has executed this travel ban,” he said.
It was the first Yates had heard of the order. “I had been sitting in Don McGahn’s office an hour before that,” she said. “He didn’t tell me.” She later learned that lawyers in the Office of Legal Counsel, at the Justice Department, had reviewed the order, and that they had been instructed not to share it with her. A source familiar with the process said that even the most senior Trump aide assigned to Yates’s office didn’t know about the order until he saw the news on CNN.
Yates found the order online and read it on her iPad. At the dinner, she spent much of the evening on her phone at the back of the ballroom. Over the weekend, several individuals challenged the executive order in federal court. Yates read through the briefs, and thought that two arguments against the order were particularly strong. Because it appeared to be based on the Muslim ban that Trump had proposed during the campaign, and because it gave preferential treatment to Syrian Christians, it arguably violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. And, because the ban denied entry both to visa holders and to legal residents, there seemed to be serious due-process questions. From Atlanta, Yates instructed Justice lawyers to address any procedural issues, but to refrain from taking any position on the constitutionality of the order.
On Monday, back in Washington, Yates gathered about a dozen Trump political appointees and senior career staff in her conference room, where she had hung a large portrait of former Attorney General Griffin Bell. “It was a long discussion about the order and whether it was appropriate and constitutional,” a source familiar with the process said. “There was no consensus, but there was a lot of discussion.”
Yates recalled saying, “I’m troubled about this from a constitutional standpoint—really troubled about this—but I want to hear, O.K., here are the challenges, but what’s the defense to this?” She wasn’t impressed by the argument, made by some officials, that the order had nothing to do with religion. After the meeting, she asked Trump’s most senior appointee in the office to stay, and told him that she remained concerned, and wasn’t sure what she would do.
Yates went back to her office, where she weighed her options: she would either resign or refuse to defend the order. She told me, “But here’s the thing: resignation would have protected my own personal integrity, because I wouldn’t have been part of this, but I believed, and I still think, that I had an obligation to also protect the integrity of the Department of Justice. And that meant that D.O.J. doesn’t go into court on something as fundamental as religious freedom, making an argument about something that I was not convinced was grounded in truth.” She went on, “In fact, I thought, based on all the evidence I had, that it was based on religion. And then I thought back to Jim Crow laws, or literacy tests. Those didn’t say that the purpose was to prevent African-Americans from voting. But that’s what the purpose was.”
She continued, “This is a defining, founding principle of our country: religious freedom. How can the Department of Justice go in and defend something that so significantly undermines that, when we’re not convinced it’s true?”
Yates then wrote a statement, in which she concluded, “For as long as I am the Acting Attorney General, the Department of Justice will not present arguments in defense of the Executive Order, unless and until I become convinced that it is appropriate to do so.”
She called the senior Trump appointee into her office and handed him a copy. As he read it, he thought, “Oh, my God, the President’s gonna fire you for this.”
The statement was sent to thousands of department employees around the country. About four hours later, at around 9 P.M., McGahn’s office asked the senior Trump appointee to deliver a letter to Yates, notifying her that she had been fired. He said a prayer, and walked down the hall.
“Madam Attorney General, I have a memorandum for you from the White House that I’ve been asked to deliver,” he said.
Yates read the letter, and he said, “Ma’am, thank you for all your service.”
“Thank you,” she replied. “I understand.”
Yates gathered up some of her things, and her security detail dropped her off at her apartment. The objects she’d left behind—files, plaques, photos—were cleared out, so that her replacement, Dana Boente, who was then the acting Deputy Attorney General, could start right away.
When I sat down with Yates, it was the day after Trump fired James Comey. As with Yates’s dismissal, Comey’s raised questions about whether the President was trying to obstruct the F.B.I.’s investigation.
Yates told me, “The White House is not supposed to be involved in any investigations of the Department of Justice, which includes the F.B.I., and certainly not any investigations that involved the campaign of the President.” She added, “That’s just not who we are—or who we were, I guess.”
The next day, the Times reported that, hours after Yates’s second meeting with McGahn, Trump had dinner with Comey and asked the F.B.I. director to pledge his loyalty to him. Comey refused. Last week, it emerged that Trump had subsequently asked Comey to end the F.B.I.’s investigation of Flynn. Rod Rosenstein, the Deputy Attorney General, appointed Robert Mueller, the former F.B.I. director, as a special counsel to oversee the investigation.
Yates has been following these developments from Georgia, where Democrats have been trying to recruit her to run for governor in 2018. Yates told me, “I am totally ruling out the governor’s race.” But she also said that she wants to find another role in public life. “I recognize that I may have a voice that I didn’t have before, and part of what I want to be able to do is to figure out how I can responsibly use that voice in a way to impact things that I think really matter,” she said.
Yates remained at the Department of Justice for almost three decades because she thought that she was making a difference. “I know all of this sounds so holier-than-thou and corny and all of that, but that’s the case,” she said. “I want to find something—I just don’t know what that’s going to be.” ♦
