Step Away, Loretta

So now we have a bizarre turn in the Hillary Clinton investigation by the FBI.  That's the one where back last Monday, Bill Clinton waited at the airport in Phoenix, Arizona, for Loretta Lynch, our current Attorney General, to arrive.  They then had a half-hour private meeting.

Now, Loretta Lynch is the single person in the path for the FBI to present a case for indictment of Hillary on a variety of charges relating to her use of a private server for email, and to corruption relative to her selling favors to foreign governments in return for donations to the Clinton Foundation.  Let's just say that a whole lot of the Clintons' legal future hangs on a decision that is Lynch's and Lynch's alone.

You probably could not, as covered in this video, find a U.S. prosecutor who would think that meeting to be proper, and 99.99% would call it some version of "grossly improper."

I am not one bit surprised that Bill Clinton tried to have that meeting.  The Clintons live in Clintonland, a strange place where the laws that cover the conduct of you and me do not apply.  We understand that.

But Loretta Lynch is the chief law enforcement officer of the United States of America.  She was a respected U.S. Attorney in New York not all that long ago, a somewhat unusual case of Barack Obama appointing someone actually qualified for a senior position, at least by background.  When Bill Clinton was there to meet Miss Lynch at the airport, every single second of her training and previous employment as an attorney and law enforcement official should have told her to walk swiftly away.

Of course, he got on her plane, which means it was up to her to tell him to get away.  History shows he doesn't respond well to that, you know.  But I digress.

There is no earthly rationale for her to hear two words from either Clinton, nor to say anything other than "It is totally inappropriate for me to have a conversation with you given that I am soon to make a determination on your wife's indictment.  Walk away from me now."

Nope, Loretta Lynch spent a half-hour in a private conversation with him.  "Grandchildren", she said they discussed.  "Golf."

I do not have a clue why the topic of what they talked about was asked about, more than "Why did you not immediately walk away knowing that you would have an enormous appearance of impropriety, conflict of interest and the appearance of allowing outside influence on what will be a prosecutorial decision?".  I didn't hear that question.

We know now that Bill Clinton knew that Loretta Lynch was arriving and specifically waited for her.  We know that.  We don't know, nor has anyone satisfactorily explained, why he thought it important to wait for her, if all he was going to do was to tell her about his grandchildren.  Email works really well for that, and the Clintons have shown themselves expert in that medium.

At this point, it is imperative that a special prosecutor be assigned and that Loretta Lynch recuse herself from consideration of the indictment decision regarding Hillary Clinton.  This should have been done months ago.  Loretta Lynch is a political appointee of the president ruling on another political appointee of the same president.

But whether she did or not step away from the case before, it is imperative now, after having spent private time with the accused's husband in private (and if I were female, I would never spend three seconds with that guy in private, but that's another topic).

This, friends, is what the press these days likes to call "optics."  It looks bad every bit as much as it is bad.  Here are a few analogies, in case it is not already clear.

- Let's say it's 1973, and Pat Nixon waits on the tarmac in the Phoenix airport for Archibald Cox, the appointed special prosecutor in the Watergate investigation.  They have tea in private and chat about, you know, grandchildren.

- Or it's 1987, and Rudy Giuliani, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, is conducting his intense prosecution of major Mafia figures.  While doing so, his wife Donna pauses to meet with the Giovanni "Six Fingers" Fibonacci in a bar at LaGuardia Airport.  They spend a half-hour talking about ... you know, golf.

- How about it being December 2000.  Laura Bush has a private lunch with Anthony Kennedy, an associate justice on the Supreme Court that will be deciding Bush v. Gore and determining the next president.  Mrs. Bush emerges from the conversation to tell the assembled reporters that they talked about ... art.

The press's collective heads would have exploded in self-righteous indignation, and while the sight might actually have been a bit rewarding, in that case, the press would have been totally correct (which is how you know the examples are hypothetical).  Those incidents, fictional though they may be, represent absolutely plausible instances of analogous situations where the optics would be atrocious.

As they are here, in an actual situation.

It is not "what" they talked about, of course.  It is that they talked at all, let alone for a half-hour in private, and that Bill Clinton, who arrived first, waited for her intentionally.  He can actually be excused for doing so.  His wife, God willing, will be indicted on a host of charges.  Although his life would probably be quite the better if she were to be in prison for a good long time, he does have to be the good soldier (lest the Foundation part of the indictment sweep him up as well).

Bill can be understood but Loretta Lynch cannot.  Every instinct of her long career should have kicked in and said "Step away, Loretta, now!".

But she did not step away.  And now she has to -- far from this case.

UPDATE: as this is going to press, the Attorney General has made some kind of statement to the effect that she will allow the FBI's recommendation to go through and not change the decision -- when they recommend indictment, as they surely will, Hillary will be indicted.  The 4/100 of 1% of actual ethics in the Obama administration apparently resides in the office of the Attorney General.  I would not want to be a fly on the wall in the Clinton household this evening. Things are likely to be thrown at walls, and at former presidents.


Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
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