The White House will not be "enthusiastic" with what former deputy Attorney General Sally Yates has to say in her testimony to the Senate Judiciary subcommittee, former CIA and National Security Agency Director Michael Hayden said Monday.
"This will not settle the issue down," Hayden told CNN's "New Day" about the upcoming testimony coming from Yates and former National Intelligence Director James Clapper.
"What we have here are two career professionals, one in Justice," Hayden said. "These people will simply, candidly answer questions from a very knowledgeable interrogator, Sen. Lindsey Graham. We will learn a lot that we hadn't had detailed knowledge in about in the past."
Yates is expected to tell subcommittee Monday that she warned White House counsel Don McGahn on Jan. 26 that then-national security adviser Michael Flynn's contacts, along with discrepancies between what the White House said happened on the calls and what actually occurred, left him compromised, according to a source familiar with her expected statements.
White House officials, though, said Yates wanted to merely give them a "heads-up" about Flynn's contacts.
Five days later, on Jan. 31, President Donald Trump fired Yates, a holdover from the Obama administration, after she refused to defend his travel ban.
On Monday, Trump attacked Yates through his Twitter account, tweeting that he thinks the subcommittee should ask her about leaks from the White House:
Hayden on Monday said he expects Yates will "put an exclamation" on what she'd told the Trump White House about Flynn.
"It suggest the chaos in the Trump White House," said Hayden.
Her testimony will also show the how the administration did not trust the officials it inherited, and "it will feed that darker narrative out there with regard to the relationship with the Trump campaign and the Russian Federation," he said.
Meanwhile, Hayden said the investigation concerning Russian collusion in the 2016 election deserves to be played out.
"Perhaps the only collusion required to make the Russians successful was the campaign that chanted 'lock her up' and threatened a special prosecutor to put his political opponent in jail, if that campaign won, and a candidate himself who endorsed WikiLeaks, by saying 'I love WikiLeaks,'" said Hayden.
"Maybe that is all you needed in the political process to make the Russian effort more likely to succeed."
Hayden said he believes Clapper will testify about the intelligence that backs up a public white paper the DNI office released in January.
"Even I, as a career professional, was disappointed that we got conclusions of the American intelligence community with regard to what the Russians did to influence our presidential election," said Hayden.
"We got none of the supporting data. You have to protect sources and methods. I think Jim [Clapper] will be more forthcoming with the kind of sources and methods that were relied on to get to the conclusions."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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