People who tell the truth don’t need to remember which story to tell.
Loretta Lynch apparently needed to remember which story to tell about her secret tarmac meeting with Bill Clinton, whose wife was under investigation for possible violations of national security laws relating to handling of classified information. Lynch was the only DOJ official present with Clinton. (Lynch’s husband also apparently was on the plane, though it’s unclear whether he participated in all of the conversation.)
That meeting preceded by just a few days the FBI clearing Hillary Clinton.
We detailed the history of the secret meeting, how it was discovered, and the DOJ attempt to hide information requested under FOIA in our recent post, Loretta Lynch used alias “Elizabeth Carlisle” to email about Bill Clinton tarmac meeting.
In that post we discussed how emails and “talking points” obtained by Judicial Watch and the American Center for Law and Justice had been heavily redacted. The Free Beacon further reports that a senior DOJ official helped edit the talking points:
One of former Attorney General Loretta Lynch’s top lawyers at the Justice Department helped edit Obama administration press statements about the infamous meeting between Lynch and Bill Clinton on a tarmac last summer.The same attorney, Paige Herwig, is now the deputy general counsel for Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee. That panel is now investigating whether Lynch played any role in trying to influence the scope or intensity of the FBI’s investigation into the Hillary Clinton email scandal….Newly released Justice Department emails show that Herwig, whose title was counselor to the attorney general at the time, helped edit the first media statement responding to inquiries about the tarmac meeting….The emails show that on June 29, 2016, two days after the Clinton-Lynch meeting when the national news media was first learning of the tarmac one-on-one, Melanie Newman, the then-director of public affairs at the Justice Department, emailed her FBI counterpart to “flag” the media stories about the tarmac meeting that she noted were “gaining traction tonight.” …Additionally, Lynch’s deputy chief of staff contacted Comey’s chief of staff and counselor, Jim Rybicki, July 1 but the email string noting that contact is heavily redacted.
This raises numerous important questions, including this one: Why would Loretta Lynch need others at DOJ to draft talking points about a meeting at which Lynch was the only DOJ official present?
I certainly understand that Lynch may have wanted professional advice on how to spin the meeting, messaging not massaging the facts.
Until we see the unredacted talking points, and all the drafts, we won’t know for sure whether the facts and truth were just messaged, or whether they were massaged.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions should order DOJ to stop fighting the FOIA requests and unmask the talking points.
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