In the wake of revelations yesterday that she spent a half hour talking alone with former President Bill Clinton on the tarmac of an Arizona airport, Attorney General Loretta Lynch is set to announce that she will essentially recuse herself from any decision regarding whether or not to issue indictments in connection with the still-ongoing F.B.I. investigation of Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server and her relationship with the Clinton Foundation during her time in office:
Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch plans to announce on Friday that she will accept whatever recommendation career prosecutors and the F.B.I.director make about whether to bring charges related to Hillary Clinton’s personal email server, a Justice Department official said. Her decision removes the possibility that a political appointee will overrule investigators in the case.
The Justice Department had been moving toward such an arrangement for months — officials said in April that it was being considered — but a private meeting between Ms. Lynch and former President Bill Clinton this week set off a political furor and made the decision all but inevitable.
Republicans said the meeting, which took place at the Phoenix airport, had compromised the independence of the investigation as the F.B.I. was winding it down. Some called for Ms. Lynch to recuse herself, but she did not take herself off the case — one that could influence a presidential election.
Ms. Lynch plans to discuss the matter at a conference in Aspen, Colo., on Friday. The Justice Department declined to comment. The official who confirmed the discussion did so on the condition of anonymity because the internal decision-making process is normally kept confidential.
The F.B.I. is investigating whether Mrs. Clinton, her aides or anyone else broke the law by setting up a private email server for her to use as secretary of state. Internal investigators have concluded that the server was used to send classified information, and Republicans have seized on the matter to question Mrs. Clinton’s judgment.
For the Justice Department, the central question is whether the conduct met the legal standard for the crime of mishandling classified information.
Ms. Lynch said that the meeting with Mr. Clinton was unplanned, largely social and did not touch on the email investigation. She suggested that he walked uninvited from his plane to her government plane, both of which were parked on a tarmac at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport.
“He did come over and say hello, and speak to my husband and myself, and talk about his grandchildren and his travels and things like that,” Ms. Lynch said at a news conference in Los Angeles on Wednesday, where she was promoting community policing. “That was the extent of that. And no discussions were held into any cases or things like that.”
That did not mollify Republican lawmakers, who said the meeting raised questions about the integrity of the government’s investigation.
“In light of the apparent conflicts of interest, I have called repeatedly on Attorney General Lynch to appoint a special counsel to ensure the investigation is as far from politics as possible,” Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas and a member of the Judiciary Committee, said in a statement on Thursday.
The meeting created an awkward situation for Ms. Lynch, a veteran prosecutor who was nominated from outside Washington’s normal political circles. In her confirmation, her allies repeatedly sought to contrast her with her predecessor, Eric H. Holder Jr., an outspoken liberal voice in the administration who clashed frequently with Republicans who accused him of politicizing the office.
Ms. Lynch has said she wants to handle the Clinton investigation like any other case. Since the attorney general often follows the recommendations of career prosecutors, Ms. Lynch is keeping the regular process largely intact.
Her reassurance that she will not overrule her investigators, however, is significant. When the F.B.I. sought to bring felony charges against David H. Petraeus, the former C.I.A. director, for mishandling classified information and lying about it, Mr. Holder stepped in and reduced the charge to a misdemeanor. That decision created a deep — and public — rift.
The F.B.I. is expected to make a recommendation to the Justice Department in the coming weeks, though agents have yet to interview Mrs. Clinton. While some legal experts said they believed that criminal indictments in the case were unlikely, the investigation continues to cast a shadow over Mrs. Clinton’s presidential campaign.
Even before the revelations about Lynch’s meeting with Clinton, there were many calling on Lynch to appoint a special prosecutor to handle the final decision making regarding what to do in connection with this investigation or to hand the matter over to the career attorneys at the Justice Department due to the rather obvious conflicts of interest that already existed. Specifically, there’s the fact that Lynch is, in the end, a political appointee and the person who appointed her has already endorsed the person who is at the center of an ongoing investigation. Under those circumstances, it would seem to be advisable to remove the investigation from even the appearance of political influence or impropriety by handing it off to someone disconnected from the political process. In the past, that was accomplished by handing the matter off to a special prosecutor who was generally selected by a panel of Judges and given the full authority of the Justice Department to investigate some matter deemed to be “too political” for the Attorney General to handle without allegations that they were being influenced by politics. As we discovered as time went on, though, a prosecutor with an essentially unlimited agenda and an equally unlimited budget posed as many dangers as a Department of Justice that may or may not be influenced by politics in a specific case. As a result, it’s become more common to deal with the issue of political influence by handing responsibility for investigations in some cases over to the career attorneys at the Justice Department who cannot be removed from office on the whim of a President or Attorney General. It’s not a perfect solution, but it does avoid a good part of the appearance of impropriety that leaving cases like this in political hands inevitably creates.
Lynch had been resisting demands from Republicans that she recuse herself from making any final decisions about indictments, but that largely became impossible after yesterday’s revelations about her meeting with former President Clinton in Phoenix:
An airport encounter this week between Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch and former President Bill Clinton has welled into a political storm, with Republicans asserting that it compromised the Justice Department’s politically sensitive investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email practices while she was secretary of state.
The Obama administration declined to say on Thursday whether the meeting between Ms. Lynch and Mr. Clinton, in Phoenix on Monday night, was appropriate. The press secretary, Josh Earnest, said that the investigation of Mrs. Clinton would be free of political influence and that he would leave it to the attorney general to explain the meeting.
Ms. Lynch said the meeting with Mr. Clinton was unplanned, largely social and did not touch on the email investigation. She suggested that he walked uninvited from his plane to her government plane, which were both parked on a tarmac at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport.
“He did come over and say hello, and speak to my husband and myself, and talk about his grandchildren and his travels and things like that,” Ms. Lynch said at a news conference in Los Angeles on Wednesday, where she was promoting community policing. “That was the extent of that. And no discussions were held into any cases or things like that.”
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Even some Democrats expressed uneasiness with the appearance the meeting created.
“I do agree with you that it doesn’t send the right signal,” Senator Chris Coons, Democrat of Delaware, said in response to a question on CNN’s “New Day” program. Ms. Lynch “has generally shown excellent judgment and strong leadership of the department, and I’m convinced that she’s an independent attorney general. But I do think that this meeting sends the wrong signal, and I don’t think it sends the right signal. I think she should have steered clear, even of a brief, casual, social meeting with the former president.”
From an ethical point of view, it seems blindingly obvious that Lynch’s meeting with former President Clinton was not at all appropriate and that she should have declined to speak with him. Even if the meeting did only touch on personal and family matters, the prospect of the Attorney General of the United States having a one-on-one meeting with someone being investigated by the F.B.I. in a matter where the final decision regarding an indictment was, at the time, still in her lap was entirely inappropriate. Even taking the Attorney General at her word that there was no discussion about the ongoing F.B.I. investigation, there is at the very least an appearance of impropriety that both Lynch and Clinton should have known better than to help create by letting the meeting happen at all. Granted, Lynch may have felt that it would have been awkward to turn down a meeting with a former President who also happens to be the person who first appointed her to be U.S Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, a position she held for the final two years of Clinton’s Administration. And one can largely put a lot of the blame for this mess on Clinton, who apparently bounded onto the blame even though his own handlers from Hillary’s campaign questioned whether it would be a good idea. Notwithstanding all of that, Lynch never should have taken the meeting and President Clinton never should have tried to initiate it. As long as this investigation is pending, and even with this effective recusal from final decision making, Lynch remains the person who is at the top of the pyramid and thus any contact between her and anyone connected to the subject of the investigation, especially a husband who could be a material witness himself, is entirely inappropriate.
Lynch’s decision to defer to the F.B.I. in the matter goes a long way toward dealing with these ethical issues, but it would have been preferable if it hadn’t been necessary to raise them at all.
