Sally Yates : warned White House that Flynn was a blackmail risk

Former acting Attorney General Sally Yates (R) and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper testify on May 8, 2017, before the US Senate Judiciary Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC. / AFP PHOTO / JIM WATSON (Photo credit should read JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images)

(CNN)Former acting Attorney General Sally Yates said Monday 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 into 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 the hearing with an implicit rebuke of the President and his alternative explanations for the interference in the election.

The South Carolina Republican said the hacking was not the work of "some 400-pound guy sitting on a bed or any other country," a reference to a comment Trump has previously made on the matter.

In her opening statement, Yates said that she planned to be as "fulsome and comprehensive as possible" within ethical and legal boundaries.

Yates also warned in her opening testimony that there were some issues she could not address publicly because they involved classified information. Similarly, she said that as a former official she was not authorized to discuss Department of Justice or other executive branch deliberations. It was not immediately clear how those constraints would affect her testimony on the Flynn question. Neither Flynn nor Trump were directly referenced in her opening statement.

"The efforts by a foreign adversary to interfere and undermine our democratic processes — and those of our allies — pose a serious threat to all Americans," Yates said.

Graham asked Yates whether she had any information about whether there was collusion between members of the Trump campaign and Russia.

"My answer to that question would require me to reveal classified information," Yates said.

At one point in the hearing Graham asked both Clapper and Yates how information about Flynn's conversations with the Russian ambassador, that eventually led to his sacking, made it into the newspapers. Trump asked a similar question earlier on Twitter. Both former official said they did not know how that happened.

Lawmakers have been wrangling behind the scenes at the Capitol to bring in Yates ever since it was reported that she warned Trump's White House counsel, Don McGahn, that Flynn had talked about US sanctions against Russia with the Russian ambassador to the US, Sergey Kislyak. Officials later confirmed to CNN that Trump transition officials warned Flynn against calling Kislyak, saying that Kislyak was likely being monitored by US intelligence.

Sally Yates says she warned White House that Flynn was a blackmail risk https://t.co/UiuVBGiAZ5

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Comment by Boris on May 8, 2017 at 4:41pm: Sean Spicer Mocks Democrats: Maybe Sally Yates Will Tell Us How Russia Kept Hillary from Wisconsin?

Comment by Boris on May 8, 2017 at 3:58pm: #BREAKING #SallyYates: “We believed that Gen. Flynn was compromised with respect to the Russians” WATCH LIVE >> https://t.co/URvsqrgT8W

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