WASHINGTON—President Donald J. Trump fired his acting attorney general on Monday night, removing her as the nation’s top law-enforcement officer after she defiantly refused to defend his executive order closing the nation’s borders to refugees and people from predominantly Muslim countries.
In an escalating crisis for his 10-day-old administration, the president declared in a statement that Sally Q. Yates, who had served as deputy attorney general under President Barack Obama, had betrayed the administration by announcing that Justice Department lawyers would not defend Trump’s order against legal challenges.
The president replaced Yates with Dana J. Boente, the US attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, saying he would serve as attorney general until Congress acts to confirm Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama.
At 11:42 p.m., in his first act as the acting attorney general, Boente announced that he was rescinding Yates’s order.
Citing the earlier finding by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel that the immigration order was “lawful on its face and properly drafted,” he said. “I hereby rescind former Acting Attorney General Sally Q. Yates on January 30, 2017, guidance and direct the men and women of the Department of Justice to do our sworn duty and to defend the lawful orders of our president.”
White House officials said Boente was sworn in at 9 p.m., but it did not provide details about who performed the ceremony. In a statement, Boente pledged to “defend and enforce the laws of our country.”
At 9:15 p.m., Yates received a hand-delivered letter at the Justice Department that informed her that she was fired. Signed by John DeStefano, one of Trump’s White House aides, the letter informed Yates that “the president has removed you from the office of Deputy Attorney General of the United States.”
Two minutes later the White House officials lashed out at Yates in a statement issued by Sean Spicer, White House press secretary.
“Ms. Yates is an Obama administration appointee who is weak on borders and very weak on illegal immigration,” the statement said.
The firing of Yates came at the end of a turbulent three days that began last Friday with Trump’s signing of his executive order. The action stranded travelers around the world, led to protests around the country and created alarm inside the bureaucracy.
Yates, like other senior government officials, was caught by surprise by the executive order and agonized over the weekend about how to respond, two Justice Department officials involved in the weekend deliberations said.
Yates considered resigning, but said she told colleagues she did not want to leave it to her successor to face the same dilemma.
By Monday afternoon, Yates added to a deepening sense of anxiety in the nation’s capital by publicly confronting the president with a stinging challenge to his authority, laying bare a deep divide at the Justice Department, within the diplomatic corps and elsewhere in the government over the wisdom of his order.
“At present, I am not convinced that the defense of the executive order is consistent with these responsibilities, nor am I convinced that the executive order is lawful,” Yates wrote in a letter to Justice Department lawyers.
Trump’s senior aides huddled together in the West Wing to determine what to do.
They decided quickly that her insubordination could not stand, according to an administration official familiar with the deliberations. Among the chief concerns was whether Sessions could be confirmed quickly by the Senate.
After Reince Priebus, White House chief of staff, received reassurances from Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, that the confirmation was on track, aides took their recommendation to Trump in the White House residence.
The president decided quickly: She has to go, he told them.
The official statement from Spicer accused Yates of failing to fulfill her duty to defend a “legal order designed to protect the citizens of the United States” that had been approved by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel.
“It is time to get serious about protecting our country,” Spicer said in the statement. He accused Democrats of holding up the confirmation of Sessions for political reasons. “Calling for tougher vetting for individuals traveling from seven dangerous places is not extreme. It is reasonable and necessary to protect our country.”
Former Justice Department officials said the president’s action would send a deep shudder through an agency that was on edge as officials anticipated an ideological overhaul once Session takes over. One former senior official said department lawyers would be unnerved by the firing. Democrats, meanwhile, hailed Yates as a principled defender of what she thought was right. Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, said in a statement that the “attorney general should be loyal and pledge fidelity to the law, not the White House. The fact that this administration doesn’t understand that is chilling.”
Boente has told the White House that he is willing to sign off on Trump’s executive order on refugees and immigration, according to Joshua Stueve, a spokesman for the US attorney’s office in Alexandria, Virginia, where Boente has served as the top prosecutor since 2015.
Boente, who has been a prosecutor with the Justice Department for 31 years, had no hesitation about accepting the acting attorney general’s job given his “seniority and loyalty” to the department, Stueve said in a telephone interview on Monday night. As acting attorney general, Yates was the only person at the Justice Department authorized to sign applications for foreign surveillance warrants. Administrations of both parties have interpreted surveillance laws as requiring foreign surveillance warrants be signed only by Senate-confirmed Justice Department officials. Boente was Senate-confirmed as US attorney and, though the situation is unprecedented, the White House said he was authorized to sign the warrants.
Yates’s decision had effectively overruled a finding by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, which had approved the executive order “with respect to form and legality”.
Yates said her determination in deciding not to defend the order was broader, however, and included questions not only about the order’s lawfulness, but also whether it was a “wise or just” policy. She also alluded to unspecified statements the White House had made before signing the order, which she factored into her review.
New York Times News Service
Image credits: Jim Wilson/The New York Times