New Yorker Magazine: Why Sally Yates Stood Up to Trump
(I didn't know that she prosecuted Eric Rudolph!)
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.
...................................
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 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.”
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/05/29/why-sally-yates-stood-up-to-trump
= new reply since forum marked as read
