Corruption: Was Bill Clinton’s impromptu visit with Attorney General Loretta Lynch in a plane on the runway of Phoenix Sky Harbor airport just a social visit, as Lynch maintained? Or was it an improper contact by a man whose presidential-candidate wife is the target of an active FBI investigation?
That we’re expected to believe Lynch’s story shows just how debased our system of justice has become, and how cynical our leaders now are. They think they can say anything and it will be believed by the cellphone-carrying masses.
This was so transparently wrong and inappropriate that even Democrats and leftist media types were shocked. Typical was former Obama advisor David Axelrod’s response: It was “foolish to create such optics,” he tweeted Thursday. Yes, “optics” — mere appearances.
But it’s the substance, not the “optics,” that worries us.
Lynch told reporters, “There was no discussion of any matter pending for the department or any matter pending for any other body.” She called the visit from Clinton, who had been in Phoenix on a fundraising trip, “primarily social,” and that they chatted about travel, the Clinton grandchildren, Brexit, his golf game — everything except the investigation by her department of Hillary Clinton’s apparent illegal use of a private email server that possibly compromised U.S. secrets.
So we’re to believe a government plane was held up so that the former president — one who is regularly in Washington, D.C., on business, and thus could see Lynch virtually any time — could have a pleasant chat with an old chum who happens to be the nation’s top law enforcement officer? It defies credibility.
That’s why Lynch on Friday had to make an extraordinary statement acknowledging her meeting appeared to raise a conflict of interest and to “cast a shadow” over the pending investigation of Hillary Clinton, and said that she will accept whatever the prosecutors and FBI recommend in the case. To make clear there would be no bureaucratic reprisals, she added that “the case will be resolved by the same team that has been working on it from the beginning.”
Lynch is coming to the end of her tenure in office. What could former President Clinton, who first hired her as a U.S. attorney back in the 1990s, have offered her? Another prestigious post in a Hillary White House? A sinecure at the Clinton Global Institute? We don’t know — and never will.
We’ve already called on Lynch to resign for suggesting that the best way to fight terrorism was with “love,” so perhaps it’s redundant. But with this, she has lost all remaining credibility or trust with the public with her inappropriate meeting with the husband of a possible defendant in a federal criminal case. Really, it’s time to go.
