Attorney General Loretta Lynch is facing a federal lawsuit to give details of a meeting she had with Bill Clinton days before she was to decide on his wife’s fate.
The meeting in June was barely a week before the Justice Department which she heads dropped its probe into Hillary Clinton’s private email server.
The American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ) filed the lawsuit against the Department of Justice in Washington on Wednesday demanding more information about the meeting, which led to Lynch stepping aside from the server investigation.
As head of the Department of Justice, Lynch was supposed to be deciding whether to proceed with charging Hillary Clinton over her unauthorized server arrangements while she was secretary of state.
But she met with the Democrat’s husband on June 27 on the tarmac of the Phoenix Sky Harbor International airport, Arizona. Bill Clinton delayed his flight’s departure in order to grab face time with Lynch.
‘Don’t take off!’ the former president shouted after a Secret Service agent told him Lynch was about to land, according to Ed Klein in his book Guilty as Sin, who writes that Clinton wanted to ‘bushwhack’ Lynch in order to discredit the server investigation.
Lynch was subsequently spotted leaving her jet and local media, who knew Clinton was at the airport, put two and two together. Despite Lynch’s insistence that the half-hour meeting was a social call, a political firestorm ensued in which the DOJ’s independence was questioned.
‘Our conversation was a great deal about grandchildren, it was primarily social about our travels and he mentioned golf he played in Phoenix,’ she told CNN affiliate KNXV/ABC15 shortly afterwards.
But the ACLJ is demanding more information about the meeting and is suing the Obama administration, which it slammed for its ‘arrogance and inappropriate actions’.
‘This Administration has gone out of its way to hide information from the American public – information that is extremely troubling,’ said Jay Sekulow, Chief Counsel of the ACLJ in a statement.
‘The stakes are high. The American people deserve a Justice Department with integrity.’
It is the conservative group’s fourth major federal lawsuit against the Obama administration.
Back in the summer Lynch said she ‘would not do it again’ because the tete-a-tete ‘cast this shadow’ over the investigation – and four days after the meeting she finally said she would accept whatever recommendations the FBI made about the case.
The effective recusal came only after pressure mounted when the meeting was disclosed.
The following week, on July 5, FBI director James Comey said the agency recommended no charges against Clinton for her actions – despite her and her team’s ‘extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information’.
That was until last Friday when Comey sent an explosive letter to Congress saying the agency had discovered new emails that might be relevant to the investigation.
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