WATCH: Senator Al Franken Connects The Dots On Trump-Russia During Sally Yates Testimony
One of the more striking moments during Monday’s hours-long testimony from Sally Yates and former director of national intelligence James Clapper was when Senator Al Franken chose to help us all by connecting the dots on the Trump-Russia scandal.
“The intelligence communities have concluded, all 17 of them, that Russia interfered with this election, and we all know that’s right,” Franken started out by saying during his questioning of Clapper and former acting Attorney General Sally Yates.
“One of the questions is why do [Russians] favor Donald Trump?” Franked asked. He then listed several of Trump’s connections to Rusia including Jeff Sessions, Carter Page, Paul Manafort, Rex Tillerson, Jared Kusher and Michael Flynn.
During a humorous exchange Franken asked “Now, going to Flynn, he appeared during the campaign on Russia Today. Russia Today is the propaganda arm of the Russian government. General, since you’ve retired have you appeared on Russia Today?”
“No, not wittingly, no,” Clapper replied.
“Okay. And Flynn received $37,000 for sitting next to [Russian president Vladimir] Putin at the tenth anniversary of Russia Today. All this seems very odd to me and raised a lot of questions.”
And about why there would be any confusion for the Trump team on why Flynn’s lies were a problem. “Okay, I don’t understand why he didn’t understand that,” Franken said. “General Flynn after that for 18 days stayed at the White House. There are policies that deal with who gets clearance, security clearance and not. Executive Order 12986 outlines the rules for security clearances, and it says that when there’s a credible allegation that raises concern about someone’s fitness to access classified information, that person’s clearance should be suspended pending investigation.”
“The executive order also states the clearance holders must always demonstrate, quote, trustworthiness, honesty, reliability, discretion and sound judgement, as well as freedom from allegiances and potential for coercion,” Franken said. “And yet the White House counsel did not understand why the Department of Justice was concerned?”
“The president was told about this in late January, according to the press secretary, so now he’s got a guy who has been … clearly compromised. He’s lied to the vice president, and [Trump] keeps him on, and he lets him be in all these classified meetings,” Franken continued.
“Is it possible that the reason that he didn’t fire him then was that, well, if I fire him for talking to the Russians about sanctions, what about all the other people on my team who coordinated?” Franked asked.
“I mean, isn’t it possible that the reason—because you ask yourselves, why wouldn’t you fire a guy who did this? And all I can think of is that he would say, well, we’ve got all these other people in the administration who have had contacts,” he added. “We have all these other people in the administration who coordinated, who were talking.”
“We’re trying to put a puzzle together here, everybody,” Franken said. “And maybe, just maybe, he didn’t get rid of a guy who lied to the vice president, who got paid by the Russians, who went on Russia Today because there are other people in his administration who met secretly with the Russians and didn’t reveal it until later—until they were caught.”
“That may be why it took him 18 days—until it came public—to get rid of Mike Flynn, who was a danger to this republic,” Franken said.
