At ten o’clock in the morning on the day appointed by the Judge, Sally Quillian Yates, the deputy attorney general of the United States, stepped out of a black Chevrolet Suburban in front of the E. Barrett Prettyman Courthouse. A slim, smartly dressed woman of fifty-six, who looked years younger than her age, she wheeled a weighty legal briefcase. A cavalcade of other Suburbans pulled up behind her and out stepped more than a dozen attorneys representing the FBI, the Department of Justice, the CIA, the Director of National Intelligence, and the National Security Agency.
Yates was steeped in the law: her grandfather, grandmother, brother, and father1 were all lawyers, and over the past thirty years she had assembled an impressive résumé. As the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Georgia, she successfully prosecuted Eric Rudolph, the Olympic Park bomber, putting him behind bars for life. She and her husband were lifelong Democrats who had contributed to Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, and in 2015 Obama appointed her deputy attorney general, placing her in day-to-day charge of the 116,000 employees at the Justice Department. She was not a fan of Donald Trump.
Yates was used to winning cases, and as she and her colleagues stepped into the elevator, she had every reason to believe that obtaining the FISA warrant, which had been signed by her boss, Attorney General Loretta Lynch, would be a slam dunk. More than 98 percent of the government’s applications were approved by the FISA Court.
After Yates and her colleagues took their seats in the courtroom, the Judge appeared and asked to hear their oral arguments. He sharply questioned the government’s lawyers, who requested approval for “electronic surveillance, physical search and other investigative actions” of the activities of two Russian banks and of any “U.S. person” connected to the investigation.
As the Judge pressed the lawyers for answers, it became clear that the surveillance of any “U.S. person” covered Donald Trump and four of his associates: Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, the former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency and Trump’s adviser on national security affairs; campaign manager Paul Manafort, who had been involved in investment projects with a Russian oligarch close to Putin; Carter Page, an informal adviser on foreign affairs who, wittingly or not, was in touch with Russian agents while he visited Moscow; and Roger Stone, a political strategist who some believed had contacts with a hacker working for Russian intelligence.
The Judge retreated to his chambers and placed another conference call to his FISA Court colleagues. To many of them, it appeared that the government was being less than candid about the motive for its request. It was asking for permission to monitor suspected communications between foreign banks and a Trump Organization computer, but it was obviously seeking a backdoor way—known in CIA-ese as “reverse intelligence”—to monitor the activities of American citizens, including one Donald J. Trump, who was running for president.
The Judge was gone from the courtroom for about an hour, and when he returned, he announced that he was rejecting the government’s application for a warrant. The application had to be modified so that it did not appear that the government was indulging in reverse intelligence.
Loud groans filled the courtroom.
The Judge was not pleased by the outburst. He rose from the bench and scowled at the lawyers.
“Your Honor! Your Honor!” the desperate government lawyers shouted after him as he disappeared into his chambers.