Sally Yates on refusing to defend Pres. Trump's travel order
Former acting attorney general explains decision to overrule the Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel
Now that former Vice President Joe Biden is the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, the search for his running mate is on and former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates has been mentioned as a possible VP.
Yates made her name by being one of the first sitting government officials to directly clash with President Trump, becoming something of a hero in the "resistance." She also, as a career lawyer who's never held an elected office, could help balance the fact that Biden is a lifelong politician.
Here are five things to know about one of the top contenders in the 2020 veepstakes.
FILE - In this June 28, 2016 file photo, then-Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates speaks during a news conference at the Justice Department in Washington. (AP Photo/J. David Ake, File) (The Associated Press)
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She was fired for refusing to defend Trump's Muslim ban
Trump, just days into his presidency, canned Yates from her job as the acting attorney general after she refused to defend the initial version of the president's executive order restricting travel into the United States from some Muslim-majority countries. Yates was in the position after initially being appointed the deputy attorney general by former President Obama.
The version of the order that Yates refused to enforce was halted by a federal appeals court, but Trump later managed to get another version of the ban to pass Supreme Court muster.
She went viral over a hearing exchange with Ted Cruz
Yates later in 2017 testified in a Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing in which she was grilled on her actions relating to the initial Trump travel ban that ended with her firing. In one exchange, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, cites a law that allows the president broad powers to control who goes in and out of the country.
She responds by reading another law that bans discrimination in issuing visas and points out that the law she read was more recent than the one Cruz read. She also says she believed that the president's travel ban was unconstitutional anyways. The exchange with Cruz, who is known as one of the best orators and debaters in the U.S. Senate, launched Yates to folk-hero status among the liberals who single-mindedly oppose Trump, often called the "resistance."
Some conservatives have said Yates' interpretation of the law during the exchange was incorrect, but Yates nonetheless, because of that hearing, became an idol among much of the political left.
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She comes from a family of lawyers
A 2017 profile of Yates in the New Yorker notes that Yates' father was a judge in Georgia and her grandfather, Joseph Dillard Quillian, was a member of the Georgia Supreme Court.
Yates grandfather's official biography on the Georgia appeals courts' website gushes about Quillian's legal skills.
"He was a prodigious worker with an insatiable desire to follow the letter of the law in all opinions that he wrote or participated in," the biography says. "His opinions 'are models of clarity from premise to conclusion, written with strict attention to pertinent fact and legal principle.'"
She prosecuted the Olympic Park bomber
A native Georgian, Yates in an earlier part of her career worked in the Justice Department as a prosecutor in Georgia, and prosecuted the case of Eric Rudolph, the man who bombed Olympic Centennial Olympic Park in 1996, and later several other locations, leading to three deaths.
The case has recently grabbed headlines because of a 2019 Clint Eastwood movie titled "Richard Jewell" after the name of the security guard who was initially falsely implicated in the Olympic Park bombings by the FBI and the media -- accusations which turned his life and his family's life upside down. Yates, well after the FBI had cleared Jewell, helped to put away Rudolph.
She slammed Trump for his handling of the Roger Stone case
Yates in February wrote a Washington Post op-ed arguing that the Trump administration is eroding the independence of the Justice Department, particularly through his handling of the case against Roger Stone, a former Trump campaign adviser who was recently sentenced to 40 months for witness tampering and other charges.
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Trump repeatedly called the Justice Department's treatment of Stone unfair in public, and higher-ups in the Justice Department at one point ordered the prosecutors on the Stone case to reduce their recommended sentence for Stone from 87-108 months in prison to 37-46 months. The government in its amended recommendations noted that the initial high recommendations factored in an alleged threat Stone made to a witness' dog, although the witness made clear he "never in any way felt that Stone himself posed a direct physical threat to me or my dog."
Four prosecutors who were involved in the initial recommendation resigned from the case -- and one from the Justice Department entirely -- over the changes.
"In response to the ensuing public firestorm, department leadership complained that the president's tweets were making things difficult for them, but it is the career prosecutors whom Trump continues to malign," Yates wrote. "The Justice Department is not a tool of any president to be used for retribution or camouflage. In all of government, the Justice Department uniquely functions in a trusted bond with Americans to dispense justice without fear or favor."
Fox News' Bill Mears and Gregg Re contributed to this report.
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