Did the meeting on the tarmac in Phoenix sway her decision?
Via Hot Air:
Lynch’s untrustworthiness has always been a key ingredient to the Comey/Emailgate saga. If not for the tarmac meeting with Bill Clinton last spring, it would have fallen to her as AG to make the final decision on whether to charge Hillary. Instead, because of the suspicions surrounding her, she declared publicly that she’d follow whatever recommendation the FBI made. That left Comey as the ultimate decision-maker, so when the investigation concluded, he felt obliged to state his reasons publicly. And, having done so, he felt further obliged in October after the feds started looking through Anthony Weiner’s laptop to notify the public that maybe the investigation wasn’t concluded after all. History will never know what might have happened, or not happened, had Bill Clinton stayed off Lynch’s plane and Comey remained in a subordinate role on the Clinton matter.
According to the Times, though, there’s more to the story than that. The tarmac meeting was important in thrusting Comey into a public spotlight on Emailgate, but unbeknownst to most of the country, he and the FBI had already developed suspicions about Lynch’s political bias towards Clinton. They began in the fall of 2015 when Lynch warned the Bureau to be careful about how it described the Clinton investigation. Try not to use the word “investigation,” she insisted:
At the meeting, everyone agreed that Mr. Comey should not reveal details about the Clinton investigation. But Ms. Lynch told him to be even more circumspect: Do not even call it an investigation, she said, according to three people who attended the meeting. Call it a “matter.”
Ms. Lynch reasoned that the word “investigation” would raise other questions: What charges were being investigated? Who was the target? But most important, she believed that the department should stick by its policy of not confirming investigations.
It was a by-the-book decision. But Mr. Comey and other F.B.I. officials regarded it as disingenuous in an investigation that was so widely known. And Mr. Comey was concerned that a Democratic attorney general was asking him to be misleading and line up his talking points with Mrs. Clinton’s campaign, according to people who spoke with him afterward.
A few months earlier, when news first broke about the feds launching an investigation into Hillary’s emails, Lynch’s DOJ made a point of saying that the referral it had received about classified info possibly being compromised “was not a criminal referral.” Hillary herself later pointed to that as a way of turning down the political heat, insisting that the probe was merely a “security review.” But it was a criminal investigation, of course; one prosecutor teased Comey about Lynch’s semantic parsing by telling him that he now ran the “Federal Bureau of Matters.” The DOJ’s early insistence on giving Hillary cover with the silly investigation/matter distinction appears to have planted a seed of suspicion at the Bureau about Lynch’s motives.