Former President Bill Clinton told the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General that he was offended when many in the press accused him of trying to influence the investigation into his wife’s private email server.
Bill Clinton in 2016 met with then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch on the tarmac in Phoenix, Ariz. Both Bill Clinton and Lynch said they didn’t discuss the ongoing investigation into Hillary Clinton.
But many Republicans and conservatives said the former president could have been trying to put his thumb on the scale in the investigation of his wife. Bill Clinton told the IG he was mad when those accusations were made.
“I thought, you know, I don’t know whether I’m more offended that they think I’m crooked or that they think I’m stupid,” Bill Clinton said in his interview with the IG.
“I’ve got an idea, I’ll do all these things they accuse me of doing in broad daylight in an airport in Phoenix when the whole world can see it in front of an Air Force One crew and I believe one of her security guards,” Bill Clinton said after being asked if he discussed the investigation into his wife or Lynch taking a job in a Hillary Clinton administration. “It was an interesting proposition, but no we did not.”
Bill Clinton said part of the reason why none of these issues came up is because he is “very superstitious.”
“I never discuss anything like that,” he said. “I want everybody to focus on the matter at hand and I thought the environment was much more volatile than a lot of people did.”
Republicans at the time argued that the Clinton-Lynch meeting gave the appearance of a conflict of interest, and former FBI Director James Comey said that was partly why he kept Lynch out of the loop when he decided to publicly announce a reopening of the investigation just days before the election.
Lynch told the IG that Bill Clinton invited himself on her plane and sat down to talk, even though she thought it would only be a meeting lasting a few minutes long.
“At some point, after two or three minutes, President Clinton turned around,” Lynch told the IG. “I had my tote bags on the bench seat of the plane, because I had put them there when he came on board.”
“I had been holding them. I put them down,” she said. “He picked up my tote bags and moved them, and then he sat down. So he sat down, and my husband and I were still standing in front of him having the discussion.”
The report said Lynch’s deputy chief of staff was “shocked” by Bill Clinton’s long visit, and her senior counselor agreed that the “optics were not great.”
Lynch’s senior counselor told security detail that the meeting should end, but security initially did not let her on the plane. When she was finally let on the plane, she couldn’t seem to work up the nerve to end the meeting.
“So then … I kind of didn’t know what to do because … it was a little bit unusual to be in a room with … a former president and say … you need to leave …. So … I think I stared at them for a little bit longer, and then went back to where [the head of Lynch’s security detail] was standing,” she said.
