Thursday on Fox News Channel’s “The Kelly File,” former U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey reacted to a report that current U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch had met with former President Bill Clinton while his wife, presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, was under investigation for her use of a private email server while secretary of state.
Mukasey called the meeting a mistake and dismissed the claim it was a chance encounter.
“I think it was a mistake,” Mukasey said. “People make mistakes all the time. It was a mistake because you don’t take a meeting with the spouse of somebody who was the subject of an investigation by your department. It’s not that that’s a written rule any more than it’s a written rule that a surgeon washes his hands before he operates. There are some things that are so elementary that you don’t have to have a written rule to have them in effect.”
“Megyn, the attorney general is protected by a security detail of FBI agents,” Mukasey said. “I assume she was traveling with staff since she was on government business. The president is protected by a detail of Secret Service agents. They don’t work for the same department. They don’t encounter each other casually. That happens by design and I think it was actually not her fault. It was the president’s design. From what I read in the accounts, he was the one that pushed it forward.”
He went on to add it was cause for Lynch to recuse herself completely from the Clinton email investigation.
“The problem is the whole set of circumstances undermines the public confidence in the department and in the result,” he added. “You have months of effort by hundreds of FBI agents, by dedicated prosecutors within the department, John Carlin, who is the assistant AG within the national security division is involved in this – I mean, the national security division is involved in this investigation. He is a straight arrow. Everybody working in this case is a straight arrow. When you put a cloud over everything they’re doing by having something like this take place … She can remove the cloud by putting in place a procedure that is there for the taking – that is you take yourself out of it and you put the deputy attorney general Sally Yates, who is a very capable lawyer, really has the same background that Loretta Lynch herself has – U.S. Attorney in a major city and enormously capable. She has shown that.”
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