Sally Yates Testifies that Joe Biden Was at Oval Office Meeting on Michael Flynn

Former Acting Attorney General Sally Q. Yates testified on Wednesday at the Senate Judiciary Committee that former Vice President Joe Biden was at a January 5, 2017 meeting in the Oval Office where Michael Flynn was discussed.

Yates testified that she had not known about Flynn’s conversations with then-Russian Ambassador Sergey Yislyak until that meeting, and that the purpose had not been to discuss whether to investigate Flynn, or merely whether to withhold information from him for counterintelligence reasons. Flynn was the incoming National Security Advisor at the time.

Notes taken at the time by then-FBI agent Peter Strzok, and released in June, indicated that Biden suggested Flynn could be investigated for violating the Logan Act, which prevents private citizens from conducting U.S. foreign policy.

Yates said she did not remember all of the details of the January 5 meeting, which was first described by then-National Security Advisor Susan Rice in an email memorandum that she sent to herself as the Obama administration ended.

She confirmed that Biden was there, but could not confirm whether he had brought up the Logan Act. “I don’t remember the Vice President saying much of anything,” she said. She said no formal decision had been made about investigating Flynn for violating the rarely-enforced Logan Act, though she said that she had been skeptical about the idea at the time.

Other important points in Yates’s testimony included:

More