In the wake of the highly suspicious private meeting with Bill Clinton earlier this week, Attorney General Loretta Lynch today said she will accept whatever recommendations FBI investigators and career prosecutors make in their investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server.
“I fully expect to accept their recommendations,” Lynch said during an appearance at the Aspen Ideas Festival in Colorado. “I will be accepting their recommendations and their plans for going forward.”
While she expressed regret for the meeting, she said she will not be recusing herself from the case — something some lawmakers, political pundits and legal experts have been calling for.
“A recusal would mean that I wouldn’t even be briefed,” she said. “While I don’t have a role in those findings or coming up with those findings … I will be briefed on it and I will be accepting their recommendations.”
Via The Hill:
The case will be reviewed by FBI Director James Comey and other senior officials within the Justice Department, she added.
Lynch made the pledge following an intensely scrutinized private meeting this week with former President Clinton, which many saw as potentially improper given Lynch’s role overseeing the probe into his wife, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee.
“Certainly my meeting raises questions and concerns,” said Lynch, who has maintained that the discussion was purely social. “Believe me, I completely get that question and I think it is the question of the day.”
“It’s important to make it clear that that meeting with President Clinton does not have a bearing on how this matter is going to be reviewed, resolved and accepted by me,” she said.
“I certainly wouldn’t do it again, because I think it has cast a shadow over what it should not, over what it will not touch.”
PJ Media’s J. Christian Adams believes the meeting was part of a deliberate strategy to send a signal to the “career prosecutors” involved with the probe.
Many won’t believe Lynch and Clinton only discussed grandkids and golf in her cozy jet. But I do.
That’s all they needed to discuss for Bill to interfere with a criminal prosecution. Sophisticated insiders don’t need to use clumsy and explicit language. Merely having the tarmac summit interferes with the investigation, even if golf and grandkids were the only topics discussed.
The tarmac summit sent a signal. It is a signal to all of the hardworking FBI agents who have the goods on Hillary.
The attorney general has made it clear what team she is on. The attorney general isn’t on the side of justice. She’s on the Democratic Party team.
The meeting is a dog whistle to the FBI agents on the case and to all the front-line lawyers at the Justice Department, which Adams argues is standard operating procedure for the Obama administration.
He cites a South Carolina voter ID case that was being reviewed by DOJ lawyers when then-Attorney General Eric Holder gave an interview and speech about the discriminatory nature of voter ID laws. The next thing you know, the review blocked the troublesome S.C. law. Adams says “it took South Carolina several million dollars in attorney fees to win a federal court case to gain approval — fees the state cannot recover.” Adams had more to say about this on Rush Limbaugh’s show.
In 2010, when the IRS was reviewing applications from conservative non-profit groups seeking tax-exempt status, President Barack Obama made clear what he wanted the IRS to do through his rhetoric out on the campaign trail.
This has become known as the “will no one rid me of this turbulent ____?” tactic, as described by Erick Erickson at Red State in 2013:
In June of 1170, the Archbishop of York and the Bishops of London and Salisbury crowned Henry II of England. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Beckett, should have had the privilege, but he and King Henry had been warring over the powers of clergy in England.
Beckett proceeded to excommunicate the bishops and other opponents of the Catholic Church in England.
According to tradition, Henry II, away in Normandy, upon hearing the news asked, “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?” According to some, including Edward Grim who wrote during the time of Henry II, what Henry actually said was, “What miserable drones and traitors have I nourished and brought up in my household, who let their lord be treated with such shameful contempt by a low-born cleric?” But the former is what has taken hold in common history.
Regardless of which of the two statements Henry II made, neither of them asked anyone to go kill the Archbishop of Canterbury. Nonetheless, on December 29, 1170, four knights confronted Thomas Beckett inside Canterbury Cathedral as Beckett headed to vespers.
Henry II didn’t specifically say what he wanted. He dog-whistled it. As in: “Will no one rid me of this turbulent tea party?” or “Will no one rid me of this turbulent voter ID law?” or “Will no one rid me of this turbulent FBI probe into Clinton’s emails?”
Whether this tactic will work or not is debatable. There have been numerous reports that members of the intel community will revolt if the fix is in to sweep Hillary’s multiple infractions under the rug.
Judge Andrew Napolitano recently said on Fox News that Clinton’s failure to turn over a “critically important” email adds to the “overwhelming” case, which he says could see her “indicted for espionage, conspiracy, obstruction of justice and a variety of other charges.”
He said that if the Justice Department declines to indict Clinton for political reasons, many FBI investigators and Justice Department prosecutors could rebel and leak details of the investigation.
“If FBI agents resign and leak on the eve of the election or the eve of the DNC, does President Obama have a Watergate-like, Saturday Night Massacre on his hands?”
The “Saturday Night Massacre” refers to Richard Nixon’s 1973 firing of a special prosecutor and the resignation of his attorney general during the Watergate scandal.
Former U.S. attorney Joe diGenova predicted back in January that Hillary Clinton would “not make it to the finish line” in 2016 because she was facing a criminal indictment from the FBI.
DiGenova pointed to “vitriol of an intense amount” developing among the intelligence community, which will “fight to the death” to make sure Hillary and her staff face justice for mishandling classified information. In fact, according to two of his sources in the FBI, “they are already in the process of gearing themselves to basically revolt if she refuses to bring charges.”
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