In our OpenCdA posts on November 18, 2014, and December 5, 2014, we expressed our unqualified support for the US Senate to quickly confirm President Obama’s nominee, Loretta Lynch, to be the new United States Attorney General. Our support was based on her responses to the Senate Judiciary Committee and Lynch’s performance as a straight-up US Attorney in the Eastern District of New York.
But then yesterday in a television news report from ABC15 News Arizona in Phoenix, we first learned that Attorney General Lynch and former President Bill Clinton met privately for 15 to 30 minutes on her airplane at Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport. A few more details about the meeting were in today’s online Washington Post story headlined Attorney general meets with former president Clinton amid politically charged investigation into his wife’s email.
Both Lynch and Clinton denied that anything in their conversation was inappropriate.
Maybe, but we know that Lynch is obviously an experienced federal prosecuting attorney, and Clinton was at one time a practicing attorney. Without any doubt, both Lynch and Clinton knew any private meeting between them would create an appearance of impropriety and be a very serious breach of legal ethics and professional conduct. Conceivably, in Clinton’s case, his conduct could rise to the level of obstruction of justice.
OpenCdA would like to believe that AG Loretta Lynch was blindsided, that neither she nor her staff had agreed in advance to meet with Clinton. Former president Clinton is a proven liar, so we do not believe his version of this story, that he just happened to be at Sky Harbor at the same time Lynch was and that he spontaneously decided to meet with her.
Unless there had been prior coordination of such a meeting, Lynch’s security detail should have stopped Clinton at the bottom of the stairs to her aircraft. Clinton should never have been allowed to board her aircraft. Lynch should have instructed her staff to politely but firmly decline to allow Clinton on board to meet with her and remind him of how such a meeting would appear. It was the AG staff’s job to politely but firmly deliver that message to Clinton. Once the AG’s staff had informed Clinton that the AG would not meet personally with him, it became the duty of the FBI SAs on her security detail to prevent his unauthorized boarding of her aircraft, physically if necessary.
AG Loretta Lynch had the duty, the authority, and the “muscle” to prevent former president Clinton from being in a position to compromise her objectivity and integrity in making a charging decision about Hillary Clinton. She failed.
Lynch’s failure of duty taints any decision she might be asked to make about Hillary Clinton’s alleged criminal conduct.
OpenCdA believed that after the fetid stench of Eric Holder, Loretta Lynch would be an ethical and professional breath of fresh air at the top of the US Department of Justice.
Boy, were we wrong!