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On January 26, 2017, Acting Attorney General Sally Yates contacted White House Counsel Donald McGahn and informed him that she needed to discuss a sensitive matter with him in person. Later that day, Yates and Mary McCord, a senior national security official at the Department of Justice, met at the White House with McGahn and White House Counsel's Office attorney James Burnham. Yates said that the public statements made by the Vice President denying that Flynn and Kislyak discussed sanctions were not true and put Flynn in a potentially compromised position because the Russians would know he had lied. Yates disclosed that Flynn had been interviewed by the FBI. She declined to answer a specific question about how Flynn had performed during that interview, but she indicated that Flynn's statements to the FBI were similar to the statements he had made to Pence and Spicer denying that he had discussed sanctions. McGahn came away from the meeting with the impression that the FBI had not pinned Flynn down in lies, but he asked John Eisenberg, who served as legal advisor to the National Security Council, to examine potential legal issues raised by Flynn's FBI interview and his contacts with Kislyak.

That afternoon, McGahn notified the President that Yates had come to the White House to discuss concerns about Flynn. McGahn described what Yates had told him, and the President asked him to repeat it, so he did. McGahn recalled that when he described the FBI interview of Flynn, he said that Flynn did not disclose having discussed sanctions with Kislyak, but that there may not have been a clear violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1001. The President asked about Section 1001, and McGahn explained the law to him, and also explained the Logan Act. The President