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Thursday, February 2, 2017
Monday night, U.S. President Donald Trump fired the acting U.S. Attorney General, Sally Q. Yates in response to her statement that the Justice Department would not defend last Friday’s executive order barring entry to the United States by refugees and residents of seven Muslim-majority countries if it were challenged in court.
Sally Yates had served as a deputy attorney general under the Obama administration and it was understood that her tenure under Trump would be temporary, lasting only until Congress could confirm Trump’s own appointee, Jeff Sessions.
As with many of Trump’s other actions, it was carried out in an unusual manner. First, there was a very short gap, on the order of minutes, between Yates being told she had been fired and the release of that information to the public. The official statement from the Office of the White House Press Secretary was also characterized by what Chris Cillizza of The Washington Post calls “unnecessarily incendiary” language: “Sally Yates has betrayed the Department of Justice by refusing to enforce a legal order designed to protect the citizens of the United States […] Yates is an Obama Administration appointee who is weak on borders and very weak on immigration,” reads the statement. However, though Daily Show comedian Trevor Noah expressed regret that Trump had not taken the opportunity to use the catch phrase from his reality television show The Apprentice and tell Yates “You’re fired!” in person, nothing so theatrical took place. Yates was dismissed by hand-delivered letter.
Representative Elijah Cummings of the House Oversight Committee praised Yates. “There comes a time when people, no matter who may be their boss, they stand upon their principles, so at the end of the day they can look them selves in the mirror and say ‘I synchronized my conduct with my conscience.’ And Yates is such a person.”
| There comes a time when people, no matter who may be their boss, they stand upon their principles. | ||
Yates’ dismissal has drawn comparisons to President Richard Nixon’s Saturday Night Massacre of 1973, in which Attorney General Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus resigned rather than follow Nixon’s orders to dismiss the special prosecutor who had been appointed to investigate the Watergate break-in, the scandal that eventually ended Nixon’s presidency. In both cases, the incident involved a Justice Department employee who had refused to obey a presidential order that they considered to be of dubious legality, but Richardson and Ruckelshaus resigned, while Yates did not, a difference that former Attorney General William Barr cites as relevant in an opinion piece for The Washington Post in which he defends Trump’s firing of Yates as both legal and justified. “Yates had no authority and no conceivable justification for directing the department’s lawyers not to advocate the president’s position in court,” wrote Barr. “Her action was unprecedented and must go down as a serious abuse of office.” He went on to say that even if Yates believed that the legality of the executive order was questionable, it was still the duty of the Justice Department to give it fair defense if challenged and that Yates should have resigned instead of refusing to do so.
| Yates had no authority and no conceivable justification for directing the department’s lawyers not to advocate the president’s position in court. | ||
Dana Boente, the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, has been appointed as Yates’ replacement. He was sworn in at 9:00 p.m. U.S. eastern time Monday (0200 Tuesday) UTC.
Executive order 13769 placed a 120-day block on all refugees entering the U.S., an indefinite block on all Syrian refugees, and suspended admission to the U.S. by anyone from seven specific Muslim-majority countries, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Sudan, Libya and Somalia. It was promptly followed by protests and confusion, and a U.S. federal judge ordered the ban temporarily halted on Saturday night. As of Tuesday, there were legal challenges to the executive order in several states, including, California, Massachusetts, Virginia, Washington, and New York.
Trump’s first days in office have been eventful. Last night, he announced his nomination of conservative federal appeals court judge Niel Gorsuch for the U.S. Supreme Court. The White House issued a statement Tuesday saying that now-former President Barack Obama’s own executive order protecting homosexual and transgender individuals in workplaces run by federal contractors will remain in effect.