Quote of the Day:
Whenever Bill Clinton gets on a plane to meet a woman, he’s usually up to no good.
—former DOJ lawyer J. Christian Adams
The woman Bill Clinton met on a plane parked on the tarmac at Sky Harbor International Airport in Phoenix was Attorney General Loretta Lynch.
Ms. Lynch is the person who will have the final say if the FBI, which is investigating Hillary Clinton's email use, asks the Department of Justice to convene a grand jury to weigh evidence against Mrs. Clinton.
Of all the tarmacs in all the world, their jets just happened to be on the same one at the same time.
Ms. Lynch said that the tarmac summit was an unplanned social event at which she and the former president talked about golf and grandchildren and not about his wife's home-brew server, which we now know was chock full of classified information. Adams comments:
However, the attorney general normally doesn’t meet with family members of a target in an active FBI criminal investigation.
Hillary is just that — a target in an FBI criminal investigation.
But you’d never know that listening to Attorney General Lynch. She borrowed the narrative of the Hillary campaign when she described the FBI criminal investigation as a “security inquiry.”
Downplaying the FBI criminal investigation is a deliberate communications strategy of the Clinton campaign. It’s a very bad sign that the person who must approve any grand jury referral has adopted Hillary’s dishonest language.
Many won’t believe Lynch and Clinton only discussed grandkids and golf in her cozy jet. But I do.
That’s all they needed to discuss for Bill to interfere with a criminal prosecution. Sophisticated insiders don’t need to use clumsy and explicit language. Merely having the tarmac summit interferes with the investigation, even if golf and grandkids were the only topics discussed.
The tarmac summit sent a signal. It is a signal to all of the hardworking FBI agents who have the goods on Hillary.
The attorney general has made it clear what team she is on. The attorney general isn’t on the side of justice. She’s on the Democratic Party team.
This is the unspoken message from Lynch to all of the FBI agents on the case and to all the front-line lawyers at the Justice Department:
When you send your recommendation to refer Hillary’s case to the grand jury, you had better realize your burden to convince me I should sign off on a grand jury request is higher than you thought. These are my friends.
Adams compares the tarmac summit to former attorney general Eric Holder's giving an interview and speech saying that voter ID laws are discriminatory when South Carolina's Voter ID were under review at DOJ. South Carolina was forced by subsequent DOJ actions to spend millions defending its Voter ID law.
The FBI investigation of Mrs. Clinton's email puts into conflict two values:
This saga involves two American values which perhaps are irreconcilable in this mess. Criminal proceedings should not alter election outcomes. The Justice Department has long had such a policy, where proceedings are delayed until after an election — that’s so America doesn’t come to resemble a third world nation that criminalizes politics.
At the same time, the American ideal says nobody is above the law — even Hillary.
The meeting should never have taken place, as Ken Sukhia, a former U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Florida, who is now a Republican candidate for Congress, maintains:
Even in cases that aren’t publicly known, a lawyer or prosecutor would know that “having an unscheduled, impromptu meeting like that raises a question of was there impropriety…and particularly given the high profile of the Clintons and the very heightened attention that is being given to this issue of the emails,” Mr. Sukhia said.
But that's the Clintons and, if Mrs. Clinton wins the presidency, get used to it (again).