White House calls legal officer’s defiance ‘a dereliction of duty’

The acting US attorney general sacked by President Donald Trump was responsible for what was "clearly a dereliction of duty" by defying him on his controversial immigration order, the White House has said.

Mr Trump's press secretary Sean Spicer described the decision of Sally Yates, a Barack Obama appointee, to order Department of Justice lawyers not to defend in court the temporary ban on nationals from seven Muslim countries as "bewildering" and "defiant" when her own department ruled it "lawful".

The White House fired the country’s top legal adviser on Monday night and issued a statement saying that Ms Yates had “betrayed” the department by refusing to enforce Mr Trump’s order that was “designed to protect the citizens of the United States”. She had earlier written to department lawyers ordering them not to uphold the order because she was not convinced that the move was lawful.

Facing questions about the harsh tone of the language used by the Trump administration about Ms Yates, Mr Spicer stood behind the description of her act as a “betrayal”, saying that she had defied her department’s own office of legal compliance and that her dismissal was the “right thing to do”.

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In heated exchanges in the White House press briefing room, he declined a reporter’s request to define the word “betrayal”.

“For the attorney general to turn around and say I am not going to uphold this lawful executive order is clearly a dereliction of duty and she should have been removed and she was,” said Mr Spicer.

The administration replaced Ms Yates with Dana Boente, US attorney for the eastern district of Virginia. He will serve until Alabama senator Jeff Sessions, Mr Trump's pick for attorney general, is confirmed by the senate, which is expected by the end of the week following an initial committee vote on Wednesday.

Mr Boente rescinded the directive by Ms Yates and ordered his department to uphold the president’s order describing the decree as “both lawful on its face and properly drafted”.

Far-reaching order

The sacking of a high-ranking official revealed the discord within the US government over the far-reaching order that bans citizens from

Iran

,

Iraq

,

Libya

,

Somalia

,

Sudan

,

Syria

and

Yemen

from entering the US for 90 days and bars refugees from all countries for 120 days and from Syria indefinitely.

Ms Yates’s dismissal was compared with the “Saturday Night Massacre” of Richard Nixon’s presidency when his attorney general and deputy attorney general resigned in 1973 rather than follow a presidential order to fire a special prosecutor Archibald Cox investigating the Watergate scandal.

Mr Trump's supporters praised his decisive action. Former House of Representatives speaker Newt Gingrich, one of his closest allies, likened to it to decisions he made on reality TV show The Apprentice.

“Trump practised ‘you’re fired’ for years,” he tweeted, referring to the property tycoon’s famous TV catchphrase. “Today he applied it to an insubordinate acting [attorney] general. Congratulations.”

Democratic senator Pat Leahy, a senior member of the Senate judiciary committee that is considering Mr Sessions's nomination, said that Ms Yates was fired "for recognising her oath to the constitution and not to President Trump". The accusation of betrayal against her was "wrong" and "dangerous", he said.

Video footage of Ms Yates’s 2015 Senate confirmation hearing unearthed in the aftermath of her dismissal showed Mr Sessions questioning her on her responsibility to uphold the constitution and US laws against the then-President Obama’s “unlawful” views.

“You have to watch out because people will be asking you to do things and you need to say no,” Mr Sessions told her during the hearing. “If the views the president wants to execute are unlawful, should the attorney general or the deputy attorney general say no?”

Ms Yates replied: “I believe the attorney general or the deputy attorney general has an obligation to follow the law and the constitution and to give their independent legal advice to the president.”

The Trump White House on Tuesday criticised Senate Democrats for obstructing the new president’s nominees to lead government departments.

It noted that 17 Trump nominees were waiting to be confirmed 11 days into his presidency, which compares with seven for Mr Obama and four for President George W Bush at the same point for them.