Sally Yates does her first sit down interview since being fired with Anderson Cooper tonight.

Former acting Attorney General Sally Yates tells @AC360 that the Russians had "real leverage" over Michael Flynn https://t.co/oQtwNi4BFO pic.twitter.com/SE4OfAoMBU

— CNN Politics (@CNNPolitics) May 16, 2017

Well I know what I am going to be riveted to this evening.

Here is more courtesy of Politico:

The Russian government had “real leverage” over former national security adviser Michael Flynn when he was fired by President Donald Trump, former acting Attorney General Sally Yates said in an interview that aired Tuesday morning. 

Yates informed the White House that Flynn had misled Vice President Mike Pence and others about the nature of conversations he had had with Russia’s ambassador to the U.S., information she delivered shortly before she was fired over her unwillingness to defend the president’s executive order banning individuals from certain majority-Muslim nations from entering the nation.

Yates denied an allegation from the president that it was she who had leaked the information regarding Flynn to the Post, telling Cooper that she had never leaked classified information to the newspaper nor had she authorized anyone else to do so. She also said that Flynn’s actions were potentially criminal in nature, even though White House press secretary Sean Spicer has said that the former national security adviser was let go because of a “trust issue” and not over legal concerns. 

“I don't know how the white house reached the conclusion there was no legal issue,” she said. “It certainly wasn't from my discussion with them.” 

I think Yates may have been the first official to understand that the Trump folks had a very suspicious relationship with Russia.

And now of course we all know that.

Yates also said this is in an interview with The New Yorker:  

Yates declined to talk about any classified information, including underlying evidence in the Flynn case, but it seems clear that Flynn’s name was not masked in the reports on the phone call that she saw. She said, “I oftentimes would get intel reports that included the name of the U.S. person. Not because I or anybody else had asked for it to be unmasked, but because that intelligence only made sense if you knew who the identity of the U.S. person was, and that’s an exception to the minimization requirements.” In other words, the authors of these intelligence reports included the names, because the reports could not be understood without them. She noted that there was one other common instance in which an American’s name would be included: “If it’s evidence of a crime.” 

Yates said that she never made an unmasking request, adding, “This idea that there’s this dramatic unmasking of a name—in my experience, that never happened.”

Just another made up conspiracy by the Republicans to provide cover for an actual scandal by one of their own.