The Bill Clinton-Loretta Lynch Tarmac Meeting
Phoenix-based KNXV reporter Christopher Sign broke the story of the tarmac meeting two days later, prompting a chain of events that would include an unprecedented news conference by then-FBI Director James Comey.
Documents reveal Department of Justice staffers were given a ‘heads-up’ that KNXV had learned about the meeting, and assisted the Attorney General on how to address any potential questions from reporters.
The repoprter, Christopher Sign, died of apparent suicide in 2021. In 2018, he published a book with additional details on the meetiog. According to the link above, the news that the meeeting had been discovered caused great consternation within the Justice Department:
Lynch had arrived in Phoenix for a scheduled tour and photo opportunity [the following day] with the Phoenix Police Department over community policing. While the tour and photo op started on time, the news conference that followed started nearly an hour late for reasons that at the time were not explained. It would now appear likely the delay was to give DOJ staff time to go over talking points with Lynch prior to facing the press.
This was because during the tour and photo op the following morning, Justice Department officials were notifed that the TV station had learned about the meeting, which was not intended to be public knowledge. As of June 29, this had become a national story:
"Actually, while I was landing at the airport, I did see President Clinton at the Phoenix airport as I was leaving, and he spoke to myself and my husband on the plane," [Lynch] said. "Our conversation was a great deal about his grandchildren. It was primarily social and about our travels. He mentioned the golf he played in Phoenix, and he mentioned travels he'd had in West Virginia."
In 2020, promioting his book about the meeting, Christopher sign added other details:
'We knew something had occurred that was a bit unusual. It was a planned meeting. It was not a coincidence.' Sign told Fox and Friends ahead of the release of his new work, 'The Secret on the Tarmac.'
. . . Sign said his source witnessed the rendezvous unfold from the moment Clinton arrived at the airport.
'He then sat and waited in his car with the motorcade, her airstairs come down, most of her staff gets off, he then gets on as the Secret Service and FBI are figuring out "How in the world are we supposed to handle this? What are we supposed to do?"' Sign told Fox.
'She mentioned that Bill Clinton flattered her, talked about Eric Holder, talked about how things were going at Justice, talked about her job performance, not this golf-grandkids, Brexit.'
For Bill to be touching, however delicately, on Lynch's job performance may have been all the hint she needed that if Hillary won, Lynch's reappointment as Attorney General would be on the line. If she could rein in Comey and the FBI over the e-mail server, Hillary would owe her a big favor. If not, well, her job performance might become an issue. In 2022, Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz released his report on the 2016 campaign, which included half a dozen pages on the tarmac meeting:
“Lynch said that former President Clinton boarded the plane in a matter of seconds, suggesting that he was in the stairwell near the door to the plane. Lynch said that she was very surprised that he wanted to meet with her because they did not have a social relationship, and she was also surprised to see him ‘right there in the doorway so quickly.'”
. . . Lynch estimated that she talked to former President Clinton for approximately 20 minutes before a member of her staff came back onto the plane, as we describe below. She said that she became increasingly concerned as the meeting ‘went on and on.’ Lynch said that when she thought about it later that evening and discussed it with her staff about in the context of the case, she concluded ‘that it was just too long a conversation to have had. It…went beyond hi, how are you, shake hands, move on sort of thing. It went beyond the discussions I’ve had with other people in public life, even in political life, it went beyond that [in terms of length].’”
“Lynch said that after the Senior Counselor got back on the plane, former President Clinton commented, ‘Oh, she’s mad at me, because I’d been on the plane too long. And she’s come to get you.’ Lynch said that she replied to him, ‘[W]ell, we do have to go. And then he kept talking about something else.’ She said that he kept talking for ‘a good 5 minutes’ after the Senior Counselor got back on the plane. Lynch said that she finally stood up and said, ‘[Y]ou know, it was very nice of you to come. Thank you so much. And just…thank you again for stopping by.’ She said that they said goodbye several times, and her husband shook former President Clinton’s hand again. Former President Clinton then left the plane.”
. . . (as described by Melanie Newman, the director of the DOJ’s Office of Public Affairs): “Newman characterized Lynch as ‘devastated’ about the tarmac meeting. She stated: ‘[Lynch] doesn’t take mistakes lightly, and she felt like she had made…an incredible…mistake in judgment by saying yes instead of no, that he could come on the plane. But also, she’s like the most polite, Southern person alive. I, I don’t know in what circumstances she would have said no, or what would have happened if she had said no…. I would have much preferred a story that the Attorney General turned a former President of the United States away on the tarmac, but…she doesn’t make mistakes, and she was not pleased with herself for making this kind of high-stakes mistake.'”
In response to questions from the press on whether the meeting might influence her decision on whether to prosecute Hillary for the off-site e-mail server, Lynch announced the following Friday, July 1, that she would accept the recommendation from career prosecutors at the FBI over Clinton's use of a private e-mail server. By Tuesday, Jujy 5, Comey made his "no reasonable prosecutor" announcement, claiming, " I have not coordinated or reviewed this statement in any way with the Department of Justice or any other part of the government. They do not know what I am about to say."I think on one hand, that Bill Clinton would suddenly invite himself onto Loretta Lynch's plane to banter about grandkids, when she'd had no previous social contact with him, speaks volumes, even if we knew nothing about what was discussed. But inserting just an oh-by-the-way remark about job performance would dangle both a carrot and a stick in front of Lynch that she couldn't ignore. Certainly the perception by both Lynch and her staff during and after the meeting that the whole thing was improper reinforces the impression that it was meant to convey Hillary's ultmatum.
However, we know absolutely nothing about what took place between Lynch and Comey from the tarmac meeting on June 27 to Comey's "no reasonable prosecutor" announcement on July 5, except that even legacy media was drawing the inference that there was a connection of some sort, and even in his announcement, Comey was weasel-wording an insistence that nobody at Justice knew what he wad going to say.
Let's nevertheless keep in mind that the assessment of the intelligence community only weeks earlier, according to the Durham Annex, was that "Comey gravitates toward Republicans, and apparently, intends to prolong the investigation so that the scandal would keep going" until the election. Suddenly this changed.
And it changed in a big, permanent way. Consider that every indication we have is that the FBI had always been skeptical of the idea that the Russians were somehow controlling the Trump campaign or were favorable to it in any way. Yet on July 31, 2016, Strzok opened the Crossfire Hurricane investigation, whose job was to promote the exact opposite idea. We know just from the links in yesterday's post here that as of 2017, Strzok was still skeptica that there was any "there there", even as he was moving to run the Mueller investigation that was meant to keep the story alive.
Here's what has me puzzled. Hillary lost the election in November. That ended any leverage she had over Loretta Lynch, who would be leaving Justice by January 20, 2017 no matter what Hillary said. Shouldn't that have ended any leverage Hillary and Lynch had over Comey? Comey was confirmed to a ten-year term as FBI Director in 2013. He and his staff, including Andrew McCabe and Peter Strzok, would be staying on after the election, and they were generally thought to be pro-Republican, at least as of June 2016. If they played their cards right with Trump, they were golden.
Yet Comey and Strok dug in, just when you'd think they'd be heaving sighs of relief that there'd no longer be pressure to ease off on the Hillary e-mail server and hang Russia on Trump. Instead, by January 6, Comey was telling Trump the FBI had the pee dossier on him and had begun making detailed notes -- almost certainly self-serving -- on everything Trump said. So just who was Comey working for? Seems like he had every opportunity to get off on the right foot with Trump and continue a good career, when within months, he'd lost Trump's trust and gotten himself fired.
My bet is that someone was suggesting to Comey that there'd be a move to push Trump out via the 25th Amendment, and Comey, as a good Republican, would come out very well if he got on board. I'll talk more about that in tomorrow's post. But a reward for helping out with a 25th Amendment putsch would be the carrot -- was there a stick? Did they have something big on Comey as well? So far, I can't answer, I can only ask the question.
