Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has her own take in her new book “What Happened” on how the 2016 tarmac meeting between former President Bill Clinton and former Attorney General Loretta Lynch actually panned out.
“Comey decided to go ahead with the press conference because of supposed concerns he had with his boss, Attorney General Loretta Lynch. His decision was reportedly influenced by a forged Russian document that sought to discredit Lynch. It was fake, but Comey was still concerned (more on that in the next chapter),” Clinton wrote in a chapter of her new book, titled “Those Damn Emails,” released to The Daily Caller News Foundation.
“Comey has also pointed to the fact that Lynch and my husband had a brief, unplanned conversation on a tarmac in Phoenix in late June 2016, when their planes happened to be next to each other. Nothing inappropriate was said in any way, but both of them came to regret exchanging pleasantries that day because of the firestorm that followed,” Clinton wrote.
“There’s no doubt that the optics were bad, but that didn’t give Comey carte blanche to ignore Justice Department policies and overstep his bounds. The implication that Lynch, a distinguished career prosecutor, was suddenly compromised and couldn’t be trusted is outrageous and insulting,” Clinton wrote. “It’s also insulting to the former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates and all the other senior Justice Department officials who were in the chain of command.”
The tarmac meeting between the former president and Lynch became a key problem for the Clinton campaign during her 2016 bid for the presidency. The meeting came up again in 2017 when former FBI Director James Comey testified before Congress.
During his testimony before Congress in early June, Comey said the 2016 tarmac meeting forced him to hold an independent press conference of the Department of Justice to declare that charges should not be levied against Clinton over her use of an unsecured home server while acting as secretary of state.
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