Yates Says She Warn

Former acting Attorney General Sally Yates said that she alerted the White House earlier this year that former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn could be "essentially blackmailed by the Russians."

"We believed that Gen. Flynn was compromised with respect to the Russians," Yates told a Senate judiciary subcommittee in a high-profile hearing on Russian meddling in the US election.

Yates told the panel that she had a meeting with White House Counsel Donald McGahn on January 26 to tell him that she had information that statements by Vice President Mike Pence, based on his conversations with Flynn, were false. She was joined in the meeting by a senior career official in the Justice Department.

"We weren't the only ones that knew all of this, that the Russians also knew about what General Flynn had done and the Russians also knew that General Flynn had misled the vice president and others," Yates said, relating the contents of her conversation with McGahn.

Yates was speaking at a hearing led by Sen. Lindsey Graham, who opened with an implicit rebuke of President Trump and his alternative explanations for the interference in the election.