A mockery of ‘Justice’
ATTORNEY General Loretta Lynch said her impromptu tarmac summit at Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport was a purely social affair. Golf and grandchildren were on the agenda, she said — and not how a home-brew server crammed with classified information ended up in Bill Clinton’s basement.
However, the attorney general normally doesn’t meet with family members of a target in an active FBI criminal investigation.
Hillary is just that — a target in an FBI criminal investigation.
But you’d never know that, listening to Lynch. She borrowed the narrative of the Hillary campaign when she described the FBI criminal investigation as a “security inquiry.”
Downplaying the FBI criminal investigation is a deliberate communications strategy of the Clinton campaign. It’s a very bad sign that the person who must approve any grandjury referral has adopted Hillary’s dishonest language.
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 meeting interferes with the in- vestigation, 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.
This is the unspoken message from Lynch to all of the FBI agents on the case and to all the front-line lawyers at the Justice Department: When you send your recommendation to refer Hillary’s case to the grand jury, you had better realize your burden to convince me I should sign off on a grand-jury request is higher than you thought. These are my friends.
This is standard operating procedure in the Obama Justice Department. When DOJ lawyers were reviewing South Carolina voter-ID laws for preclearance under the Voting Rights Act, then-Attorney General Eric Holder gave an interview and speech about the discriminatory nature of voter-ID laws. Like day follows night, the lawyers responsible for the review then blocked South Carolina’s law under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act.
It took South Carolina several million dollars in attorney fees to win a federal court case to gain approval — fees the state cannot recover.
I have never believed Hillary will be indicted, even though the case appears fairly easy to make. As I said on “The Kelly File,” I suspect a county district attorney could win the case. For a swarm of seasoned assistant United States attorneys? It seems like a slam dunk.
But that’s not what matters in the age of Obama. An indictment of Hillary would likely increase her popularity with Democrats. It’s Ken Starr all over again. Remember, Bill Clinton became more popular when he was under legal attack.
This saga involves two American values that perhaps are irreconcilable in this mess.
Criminal proceedings should not alter election outcomes. The Justice Department has long had such a policy where proceedings are delayed until after an election — that’s so America doesn’t come to resemble a third-world nation that criminalizes politics.
At the same time, the American ideal says nobody is above the law — even Hillary.
That’s what separates the Anglo-America legal experience from every other legal culture in world history.
This is a marriage of a Clinton-style carnival ride in an age of Obama-style lawlessness. The stars of “no controlling legal authority” are behaving badly in an age of “punishing your enemies and rewarding your friends.”
That it is no longer about a dalliance with a White House intern and instead involves national security makes the gangsterism all the more frightening.