Yates’s testimony about Michael Flynn contradicted the White House’s story. Photograph by Jared Soares for The New Yorker

It is hard to locate when President Trump first declared war on the government establishment, but the story may well begin on the night of January 30th. Three days earlier, Trump, prodded by his most ideological aides, had issued an executive order banning travellers from seven Muslim-majority countries. On the 30th, Sally Yates, the acting U.S. Attorney General, refused to defend the order, saying that she was not convinced that it was lawful. Trump reacted with a fury not seen in the White House since the Nixon era.

Yates had been working in her office at the Department of Justice, several blocks away. A twenty-seven-year veteran of the department, she knew that she would not occupy the office long. Jeff Sessions, a Republican senator from Alabama, was Trump’s choice to be Attorney General, and although he was likely to face some tough questioning from the Senate Judiciary Committee, he was also almost certain to win confirmation.

Yates heard a knock at her door. “I remember it vividly,” she told me. “They came to the door of my office.”

A senior Trump appointee in the Justice Department handed her a letter. It said, “I’m informing you that the president has removed you from the office of deputy attorney general of the United States.” A few minutes later, the White House press secretary, Sean Spicer, issued a corrosive statement regarding the action: “Ms. Yates is an Obama Administration appointee who is weak on borders and very weak on illegal immigration. It is time to get serious about protecting our country.”

Sally Quillian Yates, who is fifty-six, spent more than two decades as a federal prosecutor in Georgia before being named a U.S. Attorney and then the Deputy Attorney General by President Obama. She and her husband, Comer, live in Atlanta, but she keeps a modest apartment in Washington, where I met her for her first interview since her career at the Department of Justice ended. Yates was composed, disciplined, and sharp-witted as she spoke about her brief time in the Trump Administration, but she showed more emotion when we came to the moment of her firing.

“Intellectually, I absolutely knew that this was a strong possibility,” she said. “But I didn’t want to end my service with the Department of Justice by being fired. Of course, I was temporary—I understand that. But, after twenty-seven years, that’s not how I expected it to end. Knowing something intellectually, and feeling it emotionally, as I am demonstrating right now, are kind of two different things.”

After her dismissal, Yates went home to Georgia, and refused all media requests. When she returned to Washington, more than three months later, it was to appear before a Senate Judiciary Subcommittee about her ten tumultuous days in the Trump Administration. Yates testified about the travel ban, and about the potentially criminal conduct of General Michael Flynn, the former national-security adviser, who was forced to resign after lying about conversations with the Russian Ambassador. In her Georgia lilt, Yates explained that she had repeatedly warned the White House about Flynn, contradicting the Trump Administration’s story. She recalled that she told the White House counsel, Don McGahn, that “the national-security adviser essentially could be blackmailed by the Russians.”

Yates faced nine senators, eight of them men, who at times lectured her about her responsibilities.

“Are you familiar with 8 U.S.C. Section 1182?” Senator Ted Cruz asked.

“Not off the top of my head, no,” Yates replied.

“It is the binding statutory authority for the executive order that you refused to implement, and that led to your termination. So it—it certainly is a relevant and not a terribly obscure statute.”

Cruz read a portion of the law, which vested the President with the authority to “suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens as immigrants,” and gave a self-satisfied grin.

“I am familiar with that,” Yates told Cruz. “And I’m also familiar with an additional provision of the I.N.A.”—the Immigration and Nationality Act—“that says no person shall receive preference or be discriminated against an issuance of a visa because of race, nationality, or place of birth, that I believe was promulgated after the statute that you just quoted.” She added that, beyond the text of the statute, she had to judge whether Trump’s executive order was in violation of the Constitution.

The video clip of Yates’s retort became a social-media sensation. During the subsequent round of questioning, Cruz was conspicuously absent.

Before her firing, few people had heard of Sally Yates, but she became a hero to the Trump opposition. Hundreds of people sent her letters of thanks, which are stacked in her home in Atlanta. “ ‘Humbling’ is the only word I can think of,” she said. “I’ve never been generous enough to write somebody else a letter who did something that didn’t personally involve me.” After her Senate appearance, many young women—and plenty of men—made Yates their social-media avatar, as Yates’s twenty-five-year-old daughter proudly informed her.

Sally Caroline Quillian was born in Atlanta in 1960, into a family of lawyers and Methodist ministers. “Those were the two career options,” she told me. Her father, J. Kelley Quillian, served as a judge on the Georgia Court of Appeals from 1966 to 1984. His father, Joseph Dillard Quillian, who was born in Georgia in 1893, practiced law for thirty-eight years before becoming a judge, serving on the state supreme court from 1960 to 1966. When he died, in 1968, his official court obituary praised him for having “an insatiable desire to follow the letter of the law in all opinions that he wrote or participated in.”

Yates’s paternal grandmother, Tabitha Quillian, was one of the first women to be admitted to the Georgia bar, in 1934. She had studied under a lawyer, without telling her husband. According to family lore, he learned about it when he found her name in the newspaper one morning. Yates told me, “My grandfather turned to her and said, ‘Look at that! There’s another Tabitha Quillian who passed the bar.’ ” At that time in the South, it was unheard of for women to practice law, so she worked as her husband’s legal secretary and then played a similar role for her two sons. Yates was impressed by her willingness to speak out. “Mama, as we called her, was not one to hold back her opinion on things,” she said.

Yates’s mother, Xara Terrell, was also a Georgia native and the daughter of a lawyer. She and Kelley Quillian had two daughters, Sally and her sister, Terre, who is now a conservative talk-radio host in Birmingham, Alabama. Yates went to college at the University of Georgia, where she studied journalism. “When I graduated from college, my thought was: I don’t want to be a lawyer. I don’t want to marry a lawyer. And I don’t even really want a lot of lawyer friends,” she said. “I am a lawyer. I married a lawyer. And I’ve got a lot of lawyer friends. So much for knowing what you’re going to do.” Thinking that she might want to work on Capitol Hill, she spent a summer in Washington as an intern for Senator Sam Nunn, a Democrat from Georgia. After college, she moved to Washington and worked as a staff assistant for Representative Jack Brinkley, a conservative Democrat, also from Georgia. The experience helped change her mind about studying law. “I loved the process of being in the center, where it felt like the important decisions are being made about our country,” she said.