GOP's Top Mayorkas Investigator Is Benghazi Probe Alum
GOP's Top Mayorkas Investigator Is Benghazi Probe Alum
The lead investigator for the Republican impeachment of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas is no stranger to doomed efforts.
Today, Sang Yi is the House Homeland Security Committee’s director of investigations, a senior staffer in the House impeachment of Mayorkas. In 2012, Yi was a professional staff member working for the Republicans who successfully politicized the deadly attacks in Benghazi, Libya, but failed to prove misconduct by then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Similarly, the Mayorkas impeachment effort has been criticized by Democrats, legal and constitutional scholars, and even congressional Republicans. There’s no viable path to a conviction and although the Senate is expected to decide on next steps this week, it’s not clear the impeachment will even go to trial.
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In the years since Benghazi, Yi has honed his oversight craft under the tutelage of right-wing, theocratic-leaning organizations that are no stranger to causes both radical and untethered from fact. Some have been reported as pushing a Trumpist agenda on congressional Republicans.
Yi has also served as a public official in Fairfax, VA, where he publicly championed causes including diversity and environmentalism. Yi is himself an immigrant who when running for office praised Latino and Hispanic culture. (Yi and the committee did not respond to emailed questions and a request for comment.)
Although Yi is not named in the Benghazi probe record, he was a professional staff member of the Oversight Committee at the time and can be seen sitting behind then-Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) during the first hearing.
Kurt Bardella was the committee’s deputy communications director and senior advisor back then. Asked where Yi stood on the Benghazi investigation at the time, Bardella said he didn’t know, given that Yi was low level at the time.
However, Bardella called Yi “an eager beaver wanting to do whatever project was thrown at him.” Bardella added, “I found him annoying.”
When the Republican Benghazi fever finally broke, the GOP investigations seemed to have backfired politically, exonerating Clinton and the Obama administration of legal wrongdoing. Even some Republicans criticized the investigations.
But if Yi was an eager beaver in 2012, ideological training since then by theological, hard-right outside groups has likely not tempered that impulse. One former Democratic Hill staffer, who asked not to be named, said that today’s Republican staffs are a new breed.
“It used to be there were some people who would push back” against extreme partisan use of congressional oversight, the former staffer said. “[Then-Rep.] Chris Shays from Connecticut didn’t buy into some of the crazy stuff.”
That’s no longer the case, the former staffer said. Those tempering influences “faded away, so now it’s sort of competing to see who can be the most aggressive.”
And since the Benghazi probe, Yi has had training from that camp, in literal boot camps staged by the theocratic far right.
The boot camps were created jointly by the American Accountability Foundation (AAF), Heritage Foundation, and Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI).
The AAF has made a name for itself targeting nominees and appointees of Pres. Joe Biden. Especially, according to one report, women and people of color. The AAF is run by a former aide to then-Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC).
DeMint is a founder of the CPI, and former president of Heritage. Ironically, he was ousted from Heritage amid tensions over his alignment with Trump.
Now, the tensions are gone and Heritage is on board the Trump train, laying track for a second presidency with Project 2025. Heritage is leading a coalition of groups, including CPI, planning to capitalize on a second Trump presidency by sweeping aside longtime government employees who might be slow to bow to Trump’s will.
The agenda includes further restrictions on reproductive and LGBTQ+ rights, and minimizing legislative and judicial power in the face of a Trump presidency. The groups behind it aren’t waiting for a Trump victory; they’re already training legislative staff.
The staff researcher boot camps take place on a $7 million compound named “Camp Rydin,” after wealthy software executive Mike Rydin, a Turning Point USA advisory council member.
Yi participated in two of these “Congressional Researcher Bootcamps” in 2022. The first was in May and then, after Republicans won House control that November, there was a Dec. 12 boot camp.
In his congressional disclosure filing for the December event, Yi said the trip “will help provide me training for conducting effective congressional oversight.”
It’s not clear why Yi felt he needed the training, as the Carl Levin Center for Oversight and Democracy, named for the late Democratic senator from Michigan, considered Yi sufficiently qualified to serve as an instructor as early as September 2022.
What the right-wing training organizations offered, however, included “ideological vetting.” The training emphasized how congressional staff can work with outside organizations, potentially supplementing meagerly resourced congressional staffs with assistance from wealthy organizations funded by dark-money donors.
The agenda for one of the boot camps Yi attended included a session on “coordinating with outside groups to increase the effectiveness of Congressional investigations.”
Former Republican White House ethics lawyer Richard Painter told Politico, “Even if it’s technically legal, it’s very unseemly.” Painter said that having “outside partisan groups hauling staff over to a resort with only Republicans in the room and coaching them on how to get more aggressive … really undermines the integrity of any investigations.”
If any of this actually helped Yi in his role as lead Mayorkas investigator, it’s not evident in the fruit of the committee’s labors. The two articles of impeachment condemn Mayorkas for doing things every cabinet member does: Prioritizing enforcement measures based on administration policy positions and telling Congress he was doing a great job.
The result was the first-ever impeachment of a sitting cabinet member, in this case a Latino former prosecutor, for failing to detain every single undocumented migrant possible. And the impeachment only happened on the second try, with a purely party-line vote on just about the thinnest of margins.
Even some Republican allies said Mayorkas’s sins weren’t impeachable. And some Republican senators have suggested they agree.
The impeachment’s failures may have been foreseeable. As Politico reported, the boot camps are not just aligned with former Pres. Donald Trump, they’re pushing congressional Republicans to remake their probes in his image. “Trump-allied activists are quietly shaping House Republicans’ investigations of the Biden administration,” Politico reported.
Politico named former Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows among CPI’s leaders, and election-denying Trump attorney Cleta Mitchell as a CPI fellow.
If GOP impeachment and oversight efforts — targeting Mayorkas or anyone else — seem to have missed the mark, it may be related to the boot camp’s choice of teachers. One session last year on how to “maximize research impact” was led by someone from Epoch Times.
Publicly, Yi has put forward a persona starkly different from the politics of the Heritage Foundation and its boot camp partners.
As a City Council member and mayoral candidate, Yi routinely embraced some of the causes derided by the right but likely to win votes in Fairfax, VA.
He has celebrated Ramadan and Juneteenth. One post about Holocaust Remembrance Day showed people in a concentration camp.
In September 2022, not long before targeting Mayorkas for abetting an invasion over the southern border, Yi marked Hispanic Heritage Month by posting that, “The Hispanic and Latino community contributes so much to our beautiful city.”
Yi has noted more than once that his parents immigrated here with him in the 1980s.
The bipartisan persona may have been politically beneficial as a Fairfax politician, but even then, Yi maintained heavyweight right-wing connections. During his mayoral campaign, the nonpartisan nature of that election — which is mandated by law there — crumbled after Yi held a fundraiser attended by GOP bigwigs and offering top donors access to Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R-VA).
On Jan. 6, 2021, Yi said he was working from home but was “absolutely disgusted by today’s un-American and disgraceful violence” in the Capitol. (As Politico reported, the oversight boot camps Yi would later attend included numerous election deniers. The chair of Yi’s committee, Rep. Mark Green (R-TN), reportedly spitballed with Meadows about ways to steal the 2020 presidential election.)
And Yi has displayed a theocratic bent fully in step with the right-wing organizations that ran his boot camps. When Fairfax ended religious invocations at its council meetings, Yi objected.
His reasoning suggests he shares the same God-over-government impulses that drove the Jan. 6 attackers and still drive Trump supporters today. “[I]nvocations remind us that there’s a higher power,” Yi said in a 2021 interview. “It just reminds us that there’s a higher authority than government.”
Yi also falsely characterized northern Virginians as “very religious.” In fact, 30% of his county’s population is estimated to be religiously unaffiliated, higher than the national average.
He has also in recent years claimed to have witnessed the 9/11 attacks first hand, even though only a tiny number of people actually saw the first plane knife into the World Trade Center. Yi has said he watched the attacks “across the Long Island Sound” from his vantage point on the campus of the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy.
The academy is 15 miles from where the towers stood and Yi would have had to watch the attacks not only across the Long Island Sound but also across much of lower Manhattan and the East Village, New York’s East River, and the borough of Queens.
“I had an extra-unfortunate experience of witnessing those cowardly attacks across the Long Island Sound as a midshipman standing on the campus of the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy in New York,” Yi said at a 2018 Fairfax Council meeting. “I watched those buildings crumble.”
In 2022 he described “witnessing first hand the devastating attacks.” He said he hoped people would honor the memory of the fallen by “making a compassionate America.” The following year, he took on the lead investigative post in the effort to impeach Mayorkas.
Jonathan Larsen is a veteran reporter and TV news producer, having worked at MSNBC, CNN, and TYT. You can support his independent reporting by becoming a subscriber.