White House press secretary Sean Spicer holds up a document concerning a Washington Post story on Sally Yates as he talks to the media during the daily press briefing at the White House in Washington Tuesday, March 28, 2017. Spicer discussed the Supreme Court nominee Justice Neil Gorsuch, jobs, healthcare, and other topics.

WASHINGTON — The White House says it has “no problem” with former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates testifying before a House committee investigating Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.

Spokesman Sean Spicer says the White House did not try to block Yates’ testimony. He pointed to a March 24 letter from Yates’ attorney, in which the attorney says that if the White House does not respond by a deadline, Yates will consider that to mean that the White House is not trying to invoke executive privilege, which would limit what she could disclose.

Spicer says the White House did not respond to the letter. He says the White House has “no problem with her testifying, plain and simple.”

This week’s hearing at which Yates was expected to testify has been canceled.

In this June 28, 2016 file photo, Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates speaks during a news conference at the Justice Department in Washington. The Justice Department says it’s phasing out its relationships with private prisons after a recent audit found the private facilities have more safety and security problems than ones run by the government. Yates instructed federal officials to significantly reduce reliance on private prisons.

By Eileen Sullivan and Eric Tucker, Associated Press

WASHINGTON — A lawyer for former deputy Attorney General Sally Yates wrote in letters last week that the Trump administration was trying to limit her testimony at congressional hearings focused on Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election. The hearing was later canceled by the House intelligence committee chairman.

In the letters, attorney David O’Neil said he understood the Justice Department was invoking “further constraints” on testimony Yates could provide at a committee hearing that had been scheduled for Tuesday. He said the department’s position was that all actions she took as deputy attorney general were “client confidences” that could not be disclosed without written approval.

“We believe that the Department’s position in this regard is overbroad, incorrect, and inconsistent with the Department’s historical approach to the congressional testimony of current and former senior officials,” O’Neil wrote in a March 23 letter to Justice Department official Samuel Ramer.

The lawyer said Yates still intended to testify and would not disclose any classified information. The requirement that she not discuss even non-classified material “is particularly untenable given that multiple senior administration officials have publicly described the same events,” he said.

House committee chairman Devin Nunes announced he was canceling the meeting on March 24, one of several moves that have sparked outrage from Democrats on the committee. The typically bipartisan panel has been torn by disputes over Nunes’ ties to President Donald’s Trump’s campaign and questions about whether he can lead a probe independent of White House influence.

On Tuesday, Nunes rebuffed calls to step aside from the investigation.

“It’s the same thing as always around this place — a lot of politics, people get heated, but I’m not going to involve myself with that,” he said.

House Speaker Paul Ryan continued to express confidence in Nunes Tuesday, saying there is no need for the chairman to resign.

The Washington Post first reported on the letters from Yates’ attorney. The missives were posted online and a person familiar with the situation confirmed them as authentic to The Associated Press. The person spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the correspondence.

The White House called the Post story “entirely false” and said the administration had not taken any steps to block Yates from testifying at the hearing at which other Obama administration officials were also scheduled to testify.

O’Neil declined to comment Tuesday, and a Justice Department spokeswoman did not return a message seeking comment.

Yates, who was fired in January as acting attorney general after she refused to defend the Trump administration travel ban, was expected to be questioned about her role in the firing of Trump’s first national security adviser, Michael Flynn. Yates alerted the White House in January that Flynn had misled the White House about whether he had discussed sanctions in a December phone call with the Russian ambassador to the United States. Flynn was not ousted from the White House until the discrepancies were made public.

The hearing would have been another public airing of the infighting within the committee. Democrats on Monday called on Nunes to recuse himself from the investigation after he acknowledged he went to the White House complex to review intelligence reports and meet a secret source. Shortly afterward, Nunes announced that Trump associates’ communications had been were caught up in “incidental” surveillance, a revelation President Trump used to defend his unproven claim that his predecessor tapped the phones at Trump Tower.

The Republican congressman’s disclosure prompted the top Democrat on the committee, Rep. Adam Schiff, as well as the Democratic leaders in the House and Senate, to call on Nunes to recuse himself from the committee’s Russia probe.

Schiff said Nunes’ connections to the White House have raised insurmountable public doubts about whether the committee can credibly investigate the president’s campaign associates.

“I believe the public cannot have the necessary confidence that matters involving the president’s campaign or transition team can be objectively investigated or overseen by the chairman,” Schiff said in a statement Monday.

But Rep. Jackie Speier, D-Calif., a member of the committee, said Tuesday that Nunes should step down “in the interest of our integrity.” She said his actions raise questions about whether the panel’s investigation can be unbiased and independent.

“If you become a White House whisperer, you are not independent,” she said on CNN.

Nunes argues he had to review classified, executive branch documents from a secure facility at the White House because the reports had not been provided to Congress and could not be transported to the secure facilities used by the House intelligence committee. It is very unusual for a committee chairman and ranking member not to coordinate meetings related to an investigation.

Nunes would not name the source of the information, nor would he disclose who invited him on the White House grounds for the meeting. He described the source as an intelligence official, not a White House official. In an interview on CNN, he suggested the president’s aides were unaware of the meeting.

Associated Press writers Stephen Ohlemacher, Vivian Salama and Jill Colvin contributed to this report.

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif. is pursued by reporters as he arrives for a weekly meeting of the Republican Conference with House Speaker Paul Ryan and the GOP leadership, Tuesday, March 28, 2017, on Capitol Hill in Washington. Nunes is facing growing calls to step away from the panel’s Russia investigation as revelations about a secret source meeting on White House grounds raised questions about his and the panel’s independence.