Photo: Loretta Lynch - The Clinton/Lynch meeting took place just months ahead of the 2016 election. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin, File)
The American Center for Law and Justice has doggedly
pursued information about then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch’s infamous tarmac
meeting with former president Bill Clinton.
The Department of Justice has
finally responded to ACLJ’s FOIA request with a small number of documents.
Several interesting points emerge from the DOJ’s emails, beginning with the
fact that the FBI falsely claimed not to have any documents relating to the
meeting:
[T]he Comey FBI lied to us. Last July, we
sent FOIA requests to both the Comey FBI and the Lynch DOJ asking for any
documents related to the Clinton Lynch plane meeting. The FBI, under the then
directorship of James Comey, replied that “No records responsive to your
request were located.”
The documents we received today from the
Department of Justice include several emails from the FBI to DOJ officials
concerning the meeting. One with the subject line “FLAG” was correspondence
between FBI officials (Richard Quinn, FBI Media/Investigative Publicity, and
Michael Kortan) and DOJ officials concerning “flag[ing] a story . . . about a
casual, unscheduled meeting between former president Bill Clinton and the AG.”
The DOJ official instructs the FBI to “let me know if you get any questions
about this” and provides “[o]ur talkers [DOJ talking points] on this”. The
talking points, however are redacted.
Another email to the FBI contains the subject
line “security details coordinate between Loretta Lynch/Bill Clinton?”
On July 1, 2016 – just days before our FOIA
request – a DOJ email chain under the subject line, “FBI just called,”
indicates that the “FBI . . . is looking for guidance” in responding to media
inquiries about news reports that the FBI had prevented the press from taking
pictures of the Clinton Lynch meeting. The discussion then went off email to
several phone calls (of which we are not able to obtain records). An hour later,
Carolyn Pokomy of the Office of the Attorney General stated, “I will let
Rybicki know.” Jim Rybicki was the Chief of Staff and Senior Counselor to FBI
Director Jim Comey.
There are only two possibilities here: either someone at
the FBI destroyed documents relating to the Bureau’s communications about the
Lynch/Clinton meeting, or someone at the FBI lied in response to ACLJ’s FOIA
request.
Federal agencies have personnel dedicated to responding to FOIA
requests, and presumably the people who carry out this relatively mundane task
would not lie or destroy documents without instructions from the top.
To me, the most interesting revelation of the DOJ
documents is the extent to which the Democratic Party media were anxious to
squash the Lynch/Clinton story.
Thus, Matt Zapotosky of the Washington Post
told DOJ’s spokeswoman that he was “hoping I can put [the story] to rest,”
notwithstanding that his editors were “still” interested:
I like this one from NPR. The reporter observes sympathetically that the Lynch/Clinton meeting represented “an awful appearance problem.” We wouldn’t want anything to get in the way of Hillary’s campaign!
Loretta Lynch was in Phoenix as part of her Black Lives
Matter tour.
Her meeting with the former President, which was certainly
inappropriate and perhaps illegal, depending on the substance of their
conversation, came to light only because a local reporter caught wind of it and
asked Lynch about it during the routine press availability that she conducted
after a day spent with the Phoenix Police Department.
Lynch responded
deceptively to the reporter’s question:
[W]hile 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. Our conversation was a great deal about bis
grandchildren. It was primary [sic] social and about our
travels. He mentioned the golf he played in Phoenix, and he mentioned travels
he’d had in West Virginia. We talked about former Attorney General Janet Reno,
for example, whom we both know, but there was no discussion of any matter
pending before the department or any matter pending before any other body.
There was no discussion of Benghazi, no discussion of the state department
emails, by way of example. I would say the current news of the day was the
Brexit decision, and what that might mean. And again, the department’s not
involved in that or implicated in that.
Right.
Lynch’s DOJ created talking points about the
meeting, but they apparently are secret, as they were redacted from all of the
emails that contained them.
How a FOIA exception could apply to those talking
points, which were designed to be shared with reporters, is a mystery.
But that
is how the Obama administration responded to all FOIA requests on controversial
matters: with evasion and obfuscation if not with outright lies.
And President Trump
and Attorney General Jeff Sessions do not yet, and may not ever, control the
Department of Justice.
The Lynch/Clinton meeting became a major news story and
even a campaign issue, but not because the Democratic Party press had any
appetite for the story.
As the DOJ emails show, they didn’t. Iowahawk’s famous
tweet seems truer every day:
________________________________
Emails show Washington Post, New York Times reporters
unenthusiastic about covering Clinton-Lynch meeting
By Eddie Scarry
Reporters with the Washington Post and New York Times
were apparently less than enthusiastic about covering the controversial private
meeting between then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch and former President Bill
Clinton just months ahead of the 2016 election.
The non-profit American Center for Law and Justice
published emails Friday that showed reporters asking Department of Justice
officials for details on the meeting.
Mark Landler, a reporter for the Times, is seen in one
June 30 email reaching out to a DOJ official to say he's "been pressed
into service to write about the questions being raised" by the meeting.
Matt Zapotosky with the Post emailed a DOJ official the same
day after several other emails to say that his editors "are still pretty
interested" in the story but that he wanted to "put it to rest."
Lynch and Clinton had met on the tarmac in Phoenix to
discuss "primarily social" matters, according to public comments
Lynch made after the meeting.
But at the time, Democratic presidential candidate and
former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was under federal investigation for
her use of a private email server as a top government official.
When news initially broke of the meeting, the Times did
not publish any stories about the meeting for more than 24 hours, as the
Washington Examiner reported.
