The Huffington Post is labeling the secret Arizona meeting between Bill Clinton and Attorney General Loretta Lynch a “flub” by the former President — instead of a tightly regulated rendezvous between the head of the Department of Justice and a potential witness in a federal criminal investigation of Hillary Clinton.
Ryan Grim, HuffPo’s Washington bureau chief, depicts Clinton as an overzealous bumbler in the site’s lead story, headlined “Man, Bill Clinton Is An Idiot.” He writes that the secret meeting on Lynch’s private plane was all Clinton’s idea — and Lynch merely failed to stop him from boarding.
Bill Clinton is one of the most talented politicians of the past century, but his supposedly infallible skills continue to fail him when put in the service of someone other than himself.
On Monday, Clinton was on a tarmac in Phoenix when he learned that the attorney general, Loretta Lynch, would soon be on the same tarmac. He delayed his flight so he could try to meet with her. He asked for a meeting, boarded her plane and chatted for about 30 minutes.
On Friday, MSNBC’s Jonathan Capehart asked Lynch if there was one important thing she wished former Attorney General Eric Holder had told her. “Where the lock on the plane door was,” Lynch deadpanned.
Grim offers a small concession that Clinton’s actions could harm his wife Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign:
On its face, it was wrong to do, and Democrats would be savaging Republicans if the situation were reversed. It raises one of two possibilities: Either Bill Clinton is an idiot or he wants his wife to lose.
However, this framing of the story appears to be either a press release on Lynch’s behalf or deliberate misdirection. Christopher Sign, a local news anchor for ABC15, reported that the FBI was “on the tarmac instructing everybody around ‘no photos, no pictures, no cell phones.'” He also stated that no one has explained why Clinton was at the Phoenix airport in the first place.
Lynch’s version of the story leaves many questions unanswered, and to accept her account uncritically — Bill hopped on my plane and we talked about our grandkids! — shows just how little intellectual curiosity that left-wing journalists possess. At the same time, the Associated Press’s Stephen Braun has written a story lamenting “Bill Clinton’s loose-cannon episodes,” giving off the impression of either Clinton World or the Obama Administration planting this narrative across political media.
The secret meeting, in Lynch’s own words, “has cast [a] shadow” over the FBI’s criminal investigation into Hillary Clinton’s handling of classified information on a private email server. Fox News reporter Catherine Herridge said that FBI agents are “livid” over the Lynch-Clinton meeting, “since Bill Clinton at the very least may be a a witness in this public corruption probe.”
Grim, apparently, does not even consider this angle of the story. At worst, he speculates, Lynch may have found it “difficult to turn down” a meeting with Bill — possibly to help her chances for a Supreme Court nomination under a potential President Hillary.
Despite the clear appearance of impropriety, Lynch has said she will not recuse herself from the case.
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