Yates Testimony Wrought With Transparent Lies and Contradictions

Former acting Attorney General Sally Yates has stepped in a very large pile of Congressional manure.  At a recent hearing, Yates attempted to explain away her intentions when she defied President Trump’s executive order banning travel and immigration from certain Middle Eastern nations due to the high number of instances of terror suspects breezing through a porous vetting process.

Questions began to arise in earnest after a leak from an anonymous source commented to many Leftist media outlets on the merits of the DOJs resistance to the executive order.  Many on the Right have attributed those leaks to Yates, a charge she vehemently denies.  The question remains, however, that if she is not willing to be forthcoming about her reasons for resisting the Trump order, what makes lawmakers believe she will be honest in her testimony?

From Breitbart:

Yates told the Senate Judiciary Committee that her decision was made “not purely as a policy matter,” but suggested that she had been guided by “statements” that were made “contemporaneously or prior” to the order.

She did not specify which statements she meant, but several of the judges who have blocked the executive order — and its less ambitious successor — have referred to statements made by Trump on the campaign trail about a “Muslim ban.”

Under questioning, Yates admitted that “people of goodwill can make different decisions about this” — having just argued, moments before, that the conclusion of the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel was so wrong that it had to be overruled.

This sort of double-talk that is so prevalent within political circles is reminiscent of Lois Lerner’s testimony before the Congress on her role in the IRS Conservative group targeting scandal (a case, incidentally, that was never fully investigated).

Yates’ advantage was that she was sitting alongside another long-time Democrat, James Clapper, former Director of National Intelligence, who is married to Sue Clapper, a member of the NSA.  Clapper, if you remember, was under the Republican microscope for a while for his role in supporting Obama’s bid to “do the Iran deal” and was subsequently accused of lying to Congress.  In fact, 14 members of Congress actually demanded Obama dismiss Clapper for such deeds.  Obviously, those pleas were ignored.

In 2014, Clapper ordered all Intelligence Agency employees to have no “unauthorized” access to the press in an effort to cut down on divisional leaks.  Evidently, that order was ignored in the case of the Trump executive order.

Senator Charles Grassley also grilled the two in this exchange:

On Monday, in a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Yates exposed her disregard for the law in an exchange with Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX).

The MSM cheered her performance, although it was clear that Cruz successfully proved his case.

Breitbart explains:

Cruz brought up the law that authorized the executive order, and Yates did not recognize it. She then answered by referring to another law, which does not supersede the first. She then tried to argue that the order was unconstitutional, but Cruz pointed out that her argument was a partisan one, driven by her own policy views. She then claimed no court would enforce the order — which is contradicted by the fact that one actually did.

The left thinks Yates won the exchange because she was well-prepared with a set of talking points, and offered a snappy response. That shows how desperate Democrats are to salvage something out of the hearing — which failed to produce any new evidence to back up their Russian conspiracy theories — and also how urgently they need to find new champions.

It does not change the fact that Cruz was completely correct, and Yates was completely wrong.

Here is a more detailed explanation, with a transcript of the relevant portion of the exchange, as well as a video (which the leftist who posted it called “Sally Yates Owns And Humilates Ted Cruz During Russia Hearing”).

Cruz: Well, are you familiar with 8 U.S.C. section 1182?

Yates: Not off the top of my head, no.

Think about that for a moment: the government’s chief lawyer was unfamiliar with the law that was the basis for the executive order, and which has been the basis of the government’s arguments in court in every one of the cases that she later cited. To a lay observer, asking about “8 U.S.C. section 1182” may sound like asking about a minor league baseball player’s batting average in 1987. But a senior lawyer involved in the issue should know exactly what Cruz was talking about — especially as the statute is referred to explicitly in the second version of the executive order.

Yates later said she is familiar with that law, but the fact that she did not recognize it suggests she was so biased that she had not bothered to familiarize herself in any detail with the legal arguments on the other side of the issue.

Cruz: Well, it is the binding statutory authority for the executive order that you refused to implement, and that led to your termination. So it is certainly a relevant and not a terribly obscure statute. By express text of the statute, it says, “whenever the president finds that the entry of any alien or of any class of aliens into the United States would be detrimental to the interests of the United States, he may by proclamation and for such period as he shall deem necessary suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens as immigrants or nonimmigrants or impose on the entry of aliens any restrictions he may deem appropriate.” Would you agree that that is broad statutory authorization?

Yates: I would, and I am familiar with that, and I’m also familiar with an additional provision of the INA [Immigration and Nationality Act] that says “no person shall receive preference or be discriminated against in issuance of a visa because of race, nationality, or place of birth,” that I believe was promulgated after the statute that you just quoted, and that’s been part of the discussion with the courts with respect to the INA, is whether this more specific statute trumps the first one that you just described.

The law Yates cited was passed in 1965 as an amendment to the law Cruz cited, which was passed in 1952. There are some lawyers who argue that the 1965 amendment supersede the provisions Cruz cited. However, no president has ever treated the law that way. In fact, every single Democratic president since then has used the provision that Cruz cited, specifically to exclude or restrict travelers from specific countries from entering the United States.

The questioning will continue, but the fact remains that little in the answers of Sally Yates warranted her blatant breach of protocol when it came to blocking the executive order.  Hundreds of executive orders that issued from the desk of Obama were put into play without question or nary a finger raised in objection by Establishment Republicans over his two terms.

Yet, we must now realize that the new modus operandi of the Progressives is to challenge every single decree that issues from President Trump until he is out of office.  If he can stay firm in his commitment to the American people, he will triumph.

Source:  Breitbart, Breitbart