But in a Senate hearing on Monday, the former acting attorney general produced just enough fresh intrigue to offer Democrats a new opening in the war of attrition they are waging against Donald Trump's presidency. — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 8, 2017 
 
 Investigation could run into next year 
 
 The answer to that question may not come for a long time yet -- not at least until the FBI probe into Russian interference in last year's election and possible links to the Trump campaign wraps up. The presence of her co-witness, Washington veteran and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, also had the effect of bolstering Yates' comments. She believed — correctly, as it turned out — that Flynn had misled senior figures in the administration, including Vice President Pence, about the nature of his communications with the Russian ambassador to the United States, Sergey Kislyak, during the transition period. In her long-awaited first public accounting of her dealings with the Trump administration, Yates testified that she explicitly warned White House counsel Donald McGahn in January that former national security adviser Michael Flynn had been compromised and could be a target for Russian blackmail. The former lieutenant general would not resign until Feb. 13, after the shortest-ever tenure as national security adviser. Democrats point to the 18-day gap between Yates' warnings and Flynn's firing as evidence the White House did not take the concerns seriously. Yates’ own firing creates some awkward moments 
 
 As Yates discussed her efforts to inform the White House that Flynn was compromised, her story came to an abrupt end. JUST WATCHED Yates, Cruz spar over Trump's travel ban Replay More Videos ... MUST WATCH Yates, Cruz spar over Trump's travel ban 01:31 
 
 She was understood to be referring to telephone calls between Flynn and Russian ambassador to Moscow Sergey Kislyak before Trump took office. “I looked at this EO, I looked at the law, I talked with the folks at the Department of Justice, gathered them all to get their views and their input, and I did my job.” 
 
 Clapper was not aware of the FBI's investigation into Trump 
 
 Clapper told lawmakers that he was unaware the FBI had launched an investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian officials last summer. He noted “the unique position of the FBI” between intelligence and law enforcement. “As a consequence, I was not aware of the counterintelligence investigation Director Comey first referred to during his testimony before the House Intelligence Committee on March 20th, and that comports with my public statements.” 
 
 Subcommittee chairman Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) used his time to ask how Clapper couldn’t have known about the investigation if he approved the intelligence community’s January assessment on Russian meddling, wondering if the reason is because the inquiry wasn’t “mature enough.” 
 
 “That’s a possibility,” Clapper replied. Newsletter Sign Up Continue reading the main story Get the Morning Briefing by Email What you need to know to start your day, delivered to your inbox Monday through Friday. View all New York Times newsletters. Ted Cruz asked about the Clinton email scandal 
 
 Cruz devoted several of his first questions to the scandal surrounding Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server as secretary of State. Without naming them, Cruz described Clinton aide Huma Abedin’s practice of forwarding email messages from the server to her husband, Anthony Weiner, and asked Clapper what concerns that behavior might raise.
– Former acting Attorney General Sally Yates on Monday testified before a Senate subcommittee looking into the Trump campaign's alleged ties to Russia, and analysts say she provided some key information about the departure of National Security Adviser Michael Flynn—and raised some new questions for the White House. A roundup of coverage: The New York Times lists six takeaways from the hearing. Chief among them: A lot of people, including Barack Obama and Chris Christie as well as Yates, had reservations about Flynn becoming national security adviser. "To state the obvious: You don’t want your national security adviser compromised with the Russians," Yates said in the hearing's most-quoted line. She said she warned that Flynn could be open to blackmail because he had lied about his contacts with the Russian ambassador. Politico lists several key moments from the hearing, including Yates' and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper's denial that they were ever anonymous sources for news reports about Trump campaign ties to Russia. Another was when Yates disclosed that she had to learn about Trump's travel ban from media reports. Another takeaway: Some Republicans, including Ted Cruz, are still focusing on Hillary Clinton's emails, with Cruz asking Clapper a hypothetical question about email forwarding that the Times calls a "thinly veiled" reference to Huma Adebin and Anthony Weiner. The Washington Post notes that the hearing didn't explain why the White House waited 18 days to fire Flynn after learning that he had lied to the administration, and it is unclear what administration officials did with the information Yates gave them before she was fired for not defending Trump's travel ban. Trump attacked the testimony in a series of tweets, which CNN considers a sign that Yates may have "put another dent in the administration's defenses." "Sally Yates made the fake media extremely unhappy today," he tweeted. "She said nothing but old news!" The Hill notes that there was no "smoking gun" from the hearing that is expected to damage Trump. His most controversial moment of the day was a tweet saying people should "ask Sally Yates, under oath, if she knows how classified information got into the newspapers soon after she explained it to W.H. Counsel," which some Trump critics called witness intimidation. The Guardian reports that social media poked fun at Trump after his Twitter header banner was briefly altered to include one of his own tweets: "Director Clapper reiterated what everybody, including the fake media already knows- there is 'no evidence' of collusion w/ Russia and Trump."