I am so proud. And in awe. Thank you so much. All my deepest respects Andrew Weissmann email to Sally Yates, as released by Judicial Watch, Dec. 5, 2017
On December 5, 2017, Judicial Watch released Justice Department emails obtained in Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of Justice (No. 1:17-cv-00832). One of them is from Andrew Weissmann, then chief of the Criminal Division’s Fraud Section, to Acting Attorney General Sally Yates after she ordered DOJ not to defend President Trump’s January 27, 2017, travel-ban executive order. Judicial Watch printed the line: “I am so proud. And in awe. Thank you so much. All my deepest respects.”
The New York Post the same day reported the subject line as “I am so proud,” the body as “And in awe. Thank you so much. All my deepest respects, Andrew Weissmann,” sent from his DOJ account to hers at 9:50 a.m. on January 30 — about 35 minutes after the White House announced Yates had been fired. The Washington Free Beacon and Townhall (Katie Pavlich) ran the same FOIA dump. Tom Fitton’s contemporaneous comment, as printed by Judicial Watch, was that the Mueller operation was “irredeemably compromised” and should be shut down. That is Fitton’s demand, not a court finding.
Documented The email is a government record. It is not a crime. It is not a finding that the special counsel’s later work was legally void. It is a contemporaneous, on-the-clock note from the future Mueller deputy to the official who had just refused to defend the President’s order. Yates’s Flynn-related role is a different episode and is not treated here as Weissmann’s trial assignment.