Who is Sally Quillian Yates?
ATLANTA — Sally Quillian Yates, 56, fired Monday night as acting attorney general after she defied President Donald Trump, grew up in Atlanta and was a federal prosecutor in Atlanta for 25 years before she joined the Obama administration in Washington.
The dramatic public clash between the new president and the nation's top law enforcement officer laid bare the growing discord and dissent surrounding Trump's executive order, which temporarily halted the entire U.S. refugee program and banned all entries from seven Muslim-majority nations for 90 days.
The firing came hours after Yates directed Justice Department attorneys not to defend the executive order, saying she was not convinced it was lawful or consistent with the agency's obligation "to stand for what is right." Trump soon followed with a statement accusing Yates of having "betrayed the Department of Justice by refusing to enforce a legal order designed to protect the citizens of the United States."
He immediately named longtime federal prosecutor Dana Boente, the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, as Yates' replacement.
Atlanta Ties
Yates received her undergraduate and law degrees from the University of Georgia and worked at the King & Spalding law firm in Atlanta before becoming an assistant U.S. attorney in Atlanta in 1989. Her father, Kelley Quillian, served as a judge on the Georgia Court of Appeals until he retired in 1985.
In the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Atlanta, Yates was promoted in 1994 to oversee fraud and public corruption prosecutions and oversaw a number of notable cases. Among those she successfully prosecuted: former Atlanta Mayor Bill Campbell, former Fulton County Commission chairman Mitch Skandalakis and former state school superintendent Linda Schrenko.
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Later, Yates served as lead prosecutor in the case against Centennial Olympic Park bomber Eric Robert Rudolph.
She was promoted to U.S. Attorney for the district in 2010 before Obama tapped her for the No. 2 job at the Justice Department in 2014. She was confirmed by the U.S. Senate months later with overwhelming bipartisan support, including the backing of Republican Sens. Johnny Isakson and David Perdue.
“She has been an equal opportunity prosecutor,” Isakson said then in endorsing her. “She’s prosecuted Democrats, Republicans, independents, Olympic park bombers, anybody that violated the public trust, any abuse of power.”
President Barack Obama nominated Yates to be deputy U.S. attorney general in January 2015 and the Senate confirmed her five months later. She became acting U.S. attorney general when Loretta Lynch resigned from the post on Inauguration Day.
Late Monday, Yates was replaced in her acting position by Dana J. Boente, a U.S. attorney in Virginia, whose first act was to rescind Yates’s order to the Justice Department.
Yates’ appointment as acting attorney general would not have lasted much longer in any case. A confirmation vote for Trump’s nominee for the job, Sen. Jeff Sessions, is expected Tuesday in the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Within hours of Yates’ decision to defy Trump, Democratic circles in Georgia were abuzz with talk that she could return to Atlanta to run for governor or other statewide office in 2018. Her husband, Comer, a veteran school administrator, ran unsuccessfully for Congress in 1996 as a centrist Democrat against Cynthia McKinney.
Atlanta Attorney Reacts to Yates Firing
One attorney who knows Yates well says she is tough and always adheres to the law.
Don Samuels knows too well just how tough Yates can be.
As a criminal defense attorney, he faced her in a courtroom a number of times.
“We were adversaries in every single case, but there are few prosecutors in my career that I would ever rank as high as her in terms of integrity, honesty and doing at least what she thought was right,” Samuels said.
Samuels says he thinks Yates did the right thing wanting to stop defending the immigration ban in court since the courts were ruling against it over the weekend anyway.
"I don't think she was making a final determination of the constitutionality," Samuels said. "She's not a judge, but she, you know, has a duty to defend and protect the constitution, and for her to say I want to take some time to study this before I start sending the department of justice lawyers into battle was exactly the right thing to do."
The Associated Press and The Atlanta Journal Constitution contributed to this report.