Today is the one-year anniversary of the meeting on an airplane on a tarmac in Phoenix between then Attorney General and Bill Clinton, the husband of the presumptive Democratic nominee for President, Hillary Clinton. Hillary was under investigation, at the time, by the FBI and Justice Department for her home email server used to handle official State Department business, including as we now know, classified information.
The meeting was not announced. It was discovered. By a local news crew.
Only then was the meeting officially disclosed. Lynch said they mostly discussed grandchildren.
ABC News, weeks later, obtained airport video documenting the meeting:
Our first post was on June 29, 2016, Gross appearance of impropriety in AG Lynch private meeting with Bill Clinton:
What do you call an Attorney General who meets privately with the husband of a person under FBI investigation, and only discloses it when asked?Loretta Lynch….Neither Lynch nor Bill Clinton are dummies. They both know that such a private meeting creates the appearance of impropriety regardless of what was discussed. Bill Clinton’s wife is being investigated by the FBI — why do you think he dropped in for a chat with Lynch?Of course they didn’t discuss the case. They didn’t need to.If there was no appearance of impropriety, why did Lynch wait until a local news crew, apparently tipped off, asked her about it?It feeds a narrative of the Clintons acting like the fix is in, with Hillary repeatedly bragging that there is no way she’s going to be indicted.
The tarmac meeting set a number of events in motion that would shake the campaign, and remain issues.
Then FBI Director James Comey, in light of the seeming impropriety of the meeting, took over the role that DOJ normally would play.
While Lynch didn’t officially recuse herself, Comey took it on himself to announce that there would be no charges against Hillary Clinton.
He would later testify that the meeting “made me worry that the department leadership could not credibly complete the investigation.”
It also led to Comey’s letter just before the election announcing the investigation was restarted:
The tarmac meeting, in Comey’s word, destroyed the credibility of DOJ, forcing him to act:
When Comey testified, after his firing, that Lynch told him not to use the term “investigation” when referring to the investigation of Hillary, that tarmac meeting once again became the context of possible collusion by Lynch to help Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Even Democrats are suggesting an investigation of Lynch may be needed:
Judicial Watch has sued to obtain records regarding the meeting on the airplane.
With all this hindsight, the secret meeting was the best thing that could have happened. It smoked out possible DOJ bias in favor of Hillary, and exposed so much of what people hate about how D.C. operates.
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