New Book Reveals Explosive Details About Loretta Lynch-Bill Clinton Tarmac Meeting
Remember that coincidental meeting in 2016 of Bill Clinton and Loretta Lynch on a tarmac in Phoenix?
The two just chatted about their grandchildren and golf and, whoosh, off they went, each to their own destination.
At least, that’s what they said. But the timing was always odd. The former president’s wife, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, was under FBI investigation over her secret email server and her deletion of more than 30,000 emails; Lynch just happened to be Attorney General — the nation’s highest law enforcement official — at the time.
“We knew something had occurred that was a bit unusual. It was a planned meeting. It was not a coincidence,” journalist Christopher Sign told “Fox & Friends” on Monday.
Sign is the author of a new book, “Secret on the Tarmac,” in which he reveals new details about the supposedly coincidental meeting — when the planes of Bill Clinton and Lynch just happened to be on the same tarmac and the two met for 37 minutes (an awful long time to talk about grand kids and golf).
The meeting happened just a few days before the FBI decided it would not recommend criminal charges against Hillary Clinton. Those recommendations would have gone to Lynch, but after word emerged that she and Bill Clinton had met on the tarmac, Lynch recused herself, saying she would simply accept whatever recommendation the FBI made. Then-FBI Director Jim Comey recommended no charges and Lynch washed her hands of the probe.
Sign said: the book “details everything that they don’t want you to know and everything they think you forgot, but Bill Clinton was on that plane for 20 minutes and it wasn’t just about golf, grandkids, and Brexit. There’s so much that doesn’t add up,” Fox News reports.
He said that his source who was there outlined that when Clinton arrived at the airport, he was waiting for Lynch.
“He then sat and waited in his car with the motorcade, her airstairs come down, most of her staff gets off, he then gets on as the Secret Service and FBI are figuring out ‘How in the world are we supposed to handle this? What are we supposed to do?’” Sign said.
“As journalists, you have to ask yourself, why are people not delving into this? Why are we not looking into what exactly happened?
Sign said that Lynch in December of 2018 testified before the House Oversight Committee.
“She mentioned that Bill Clinton flattered her, talked about Eric Holder, talked about how things were going at Justice, talked about her job performance, not this golf-grandkids, Brexit.”
Lynch was interviewed by lawmakers and staff of the House Judiciary Committee and the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform on Dec. 19, 2018. While a transcript was not released, Real Clear Politics got a copy.
“The day after the tarmac meeting, Lynch held a press conference to talk about local police policies,” RCP wrote last May. “Christopher Sign, the morning anchor for the ABC affiliate in Phoenix, asked her what she had been talking with Bill Clinton about on her jet the evening before. She said it was just pleasantries: ‘Our conversation was a great deal about his grandchildren,’ she said to reporters. They also talked about their travels, golf, former Attorney General Janet Reno and West Virginia. ‘It was primarily social,’ Lynch said, assuring everyone “there was no discussion of any matter pending for the [Justice] department or any matter pending for any other body.”
According to the way the airport tarmac meeting is described by those trying to downplay the get-together, Lynch and Clinton somehow crossed paths coming to and from Phoenix on their private planes. Typical was a “person familiar with the meeting” who tried to explain it to the press like this: “The former president, who was departing the airport on a private jet, noticed Lynch’s plane had arrived and decided to go over and say hello.” The suggestion was that it was a chance meeting. It was anything but.
Loretta Lynch described to the joint House committees landing on a hot evening in Phoenix, where the next day she would be visiting the local police department. She explained there was a standard protocol for getting everyone off the plane: They would always deplane in a series, “security detail first, my staff [next], and then I would leave and go immediately to the car.” Security exited, then the staff, all as per normal. But before Lynch and her husband, Stephen Hargrove, who was travelling with her, could get out of the plane there was an interruption of the standard procedure.
“As we walked to the door, the head of my security detail came to me and said: ‘Ma’am, I’ve been informed … that former President Clinton is also at the airfield and would like to say hello.’” According to Lynch’s testimony, she didn’t have the opportunity to think about whether that was a good idea: Her head of security had barely finished talking and “former President Clinton was standing in the doorway of the plane.” He proceeded to work the room (or perhaps we should say the fuselage). After a cursory hello to Lynch and her husband, Clinton greeted her “security detail officer, shook his hand, and then stepped toward the back of the plane” where there “were two members of the flight crew.” Clinton lavished them with attention. According to the former AG’s congressional interview, Clinton “said hello to them, shook their hand, spent about five minutes talking with both of those two individuals.”
The RCP piece concluded with this:
Let’s assume for the sake of argument that Lynch was not lying to Congress. If so, it seems to have dawned on her rather late that Clinton had compromised her, had put her in a jam. What if that’s exactly what he set out to do? It would explain the ex-president’s otherwise inexplicable behavior — how one of the great glad-handers of all time leapt onto a plane in order to bore everyone to death. He was anything but clueless; he was demonstrating to the attorney general that he could cause her real trouble, and could do so with cheerful impunity. He didn’t have to make heavy-handed threats or otherwise put himself at risk of an obstruction of justice charge. No, all he had to do was darken the airplane doorway and prattle on with seeming obliviousness about grandkids, travel plans, coal mining, golf, and Brexit.
In the wake of that bravura performance, Lynch had to convene working groups to determine whether she needed to recuse herself from the Hillary probe. She would untimately decide against recusal, but said she would accept the decision of career staff and the FBI on whether to prosecute.
What a mess. And what a splendidly innocent way of causing mayhem and conveying menace. Give Bill Clinton his due — the man is no amateur.
