While it looks like President Donald Trump is going to escape charges of committing an impeachable offense, though he seems to have behaved in an unseemly manner, it looks like former FBI Director James Comey has placed another former public official in some jeopardy. He has told the Senate in sworn testimony that then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch asked him to downplay the investigation into the matter of the Hillary Clinton email server by not calling it an investigation. That was not all she did.
Loretta Lynch’s meeting with former President Bill Clinton
Back during the campaign, Loretta Lynch, then attorney general of the United States, took a meeting with former President Bill Clinton in her private plane on the tarmac of Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport. Clinton was the husband and close personal advisor to Hillary Clinton, then a candidate for president of the United States who was under federal investigation. At the time Lynch claimed that the subject of the meeting was innocent, with discussions of grandchildren, golf, and other matters. Later Lynch expressed regret about the meeting as it provided an appearance of impropriety.
Comey decides to wrap up the investigation
Comey, clearly not believing that the Lynch meeting with Clinton was so innocent, decided to distance himself from the Justice Department and hold the now famous press conference in which he laid out the case against Ms.
Clinton in the matter of the unsecured email. At the same event, Comey stated that he would not recommend a criminal indictment. The decision shocked legal scholars considering the strength of the case against Clinton. If Comey had recommended an indictment and Lynch had followed through on it, Clinton’s run for the presidency would have ended in the summer of 2016 and not on election night when she was unexpectedly defeated by Donald Trump.
However, it was clear that Lynch was not interested in indicting, no matter how reliable the evidence.
Connecting the dots to the October announcement
Moving to idle speculation, we could connect the dots to the Comey announcement in late October that he was reopening the Clinton investigation because of new evidence found in Anthony Weiner’s email files.
Many people in the Clinton campaign have concluded that this event, more so than any Russian hacking, cost her the election.
Everything depends on what was in Comey’s mind at the time, which is unknowable. He will doubtless claim that all he was interested in was the dispensation of justice and not, as some conspiracy theorists will claim, revenge. Still, the question will likely be argued by pundits and historians until the end of time. Comey may well have played a part in the Shakespearean tragedy that was Hillary Clinton’s last gasp grasp for power.
