Senate Dem: White House more focused on defending Trump than national security

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), who questioned former acting Attorney General Sally Yates during a Senate hearing on Monday, said Tuesday that President Trump’s team is more focused on defending him than they are about national security.

“They are attuned, it seems, more to defending the president than to taking care of national security business in an appropriate way,” Whitehouse, the ranking member of the Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism, said in an interview with CNN.

The lawmaker said that would explain why it took the administration so long to act after Yates warned that then-national security adviser Michael Flynn had exposed himself to a potentially compromising situation by not being honest about his interactions with Russian officials.

{mosads}”That would help explain why, for these 18 days, until the story actually appeared in The Washington Post and threatened to embarrass the president, that they didn’t appear to take any serious action to limit this guy’s access to classified information or sensitive meetings,” Whitehouse said.

When asked if he was certain about any degree of collusion between the Russian government and members of the Trump team, the lawmaker said that there “many” various links that still need to be examined.

“There are so many different links between Trump folks and the Russians that it’s hard to believe that nothing took place. And there are lots of leads that need to be run down. But until those leads are run down, it would be impossible to say,” he maintained.

Yates, who was fired by Trump after she refused to defend his original travel ban on people from seven Muslim-majority nations, told the subcommittee she warned the White House counsel Flynn may have exposed himself to the opportunity for blackmail.

“We believed that General Flynn was compromised with respect to the Russians,” Yates said Monday.

“Logic would tell you that you don’t want the national security adviser to be in a position where the Russians have leverage over him,” she added.