“I am totally ruling out the governor’s race. I am not running for governor,” Sally Yates, a Georgia native, said. | AP Photo Sally Yates says she won't run for Georgia governor

Former acting Attorney General Sally Yates is “totally ruling out” a run for governor of Georgia, she said in an interview published Tuesday.

Yates, a former Obama Justice Department official, has become something of a liberal heroine since she was fired by President Donald Trump in January for refusing to defend his first executive order seeking to ban travelers to the United States from several predominantly Muslim countries.


But she won’t be running for governor of Georgia, despite the urging of some Democrats, she told The New Yorker last Thursday.

“I am totally ruling out the governor’s race. I am not running for governor,” Yates, a Georgia native, said, according to an excerpt of the interview the magazine published Tuesday.

“I recognize that I may have a voice that I didn’t have before,” she said. “And part of what I want to be able to do is to figure out how I can responsibly use that voice in a way to impact things that I think really matter. I just don’t know what form that takes.”