Sally Yates: Voters ‘have a right’ to hear evidence against Trump before election

By Jack Forrest, CNN

(CNN) — Sally Yates, a former acting attorney general early in Donald Trump’s administration, said voters “have a right” to hear the special counsel’s evidence against the former president before they head to the ballot box in 2024.

“The people of this country have a right to hear that evidence and to know the truth before they cast their vote and to do everything reasonably possible to be able to accomplish that,” Yates, who also served as deputy attorney general in the Obama administration, told CNN’s David Axelrod on “The Axe Files” podcast released Thursday.

Trump fired Yates in 2017 after she directed Justice Department lawyers not to make legal arguments defending his executive order that barred citizens of seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States for 90 days. She was set to serve until Trump’s pick for attorney general, Jeff Sessions, could be confirmed.

The new comments from the longtime Justice Department official come as Trump faces a total of 91 state and federal criminal charges across four different cases.

As part of special counsel Jack Smith’s federal investigation into alleged 2020 election interference, the former president was charged in early August with conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding, and conspiracy against rights. Those are in addition to a total of 40 counts in a separate federal indictment related to the special counsel’s investigation into the mishandling of classified documents.

Yates, who served in the DOJ for nearly three decades, called Smith “a talented, no-nonsense guy” and praised the strength of his team’s cases against Trump.

“They appear to be really strong cases. You know, on the documents case in Florida, let’s put aside for the moment the actual retention of classified documents. The obstruction there is just overwhelming. And that’s really what distinguishes it from any kind of good faith, accidental retention of a classified document,” she said.

Yates, in her conversation with Axelrod, weighed in on a central premise of the special counsel’s January 6-related case that Trump knew the election claims he was making were false after being told by several close aides that he had lost.

“I’m not convinced that the government has to prove that Donald Trump believed in his heart of hearts that he had lost the election,” she said. “What he couldn’t do here was use an unlawful means to try to accomplish his goal.”

Trump, she continued, “could challenge the election through filing as many court cases as he wanted to. He could even say, ‘I believe I won.’ But when he then used an unlawful means through the fake electors and otherwise to try to accomplish his goal, that’s when it became a crime.”

She also pushed back on Trump and his supporters, who have claimed a “two-tiered” justice system that pits the former president on the losing end.

“Certainly we still suffer from racial disparities. That’s the two tiers here. Not that Donald Trump is being unfairly held to account for just about the most serious crimes you could commit if you’re president of the United States,” she said.

Yates also briefly touched on the ongoing criminal investigation into Hunter Biden, and Attorney General Merrick Garland’s appointment of special counsel David Weiss after plea talks to resolve tax and gun charges between the Justice Department and the president’s son fell apart, with a trial now likely.

“I think that Attorney General Garland took the right step in leaving the Trump-appointed US attorney in place to complete that investigation,” she said.

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CNN’s Kaanita Iyer contributed to this report.