“The Capital Grille is as manly a steakhouse as you can picture, from the dark wood to the stuffed animal heads to side dishes that arrive in small barges (nutmeg-laced creamed spinach),” wrote Tom Sietsema, the Washington Post’s restaurant critic.
The only thing Sietsema failed to describe in his review were the “manly” regular customers—FBI agents packing heat, and tough-talking Justice Department prosecutors in dark power suits. The Capital Grille was their hangout, and on weekend nights they gathered round its semicircular bar. They noshed on chilled shrimp and grilled lollipop lamb chops, bought each other shots of single malt Scotch, and argued in loud voices above the din of the crowd about the Clinton email investigation.
The views of the two sides—the agents and the prosecutors—sometimes overlapped. Many agreed that the investigation was proceeding at a snail’s pace, and that if the target of the probe had been a congressman or senator instead of Hillary Clinton, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, indictments would have been handed down a long time ago.
Several prosecutors, who were in sympathy with Hillary’s politics, admitted they were appalled at the outrageous liberties she had taken with classified material. The nation’s most secret documents called Special Access Program (SAP) had passed through Hillary’s unsecure email system, endangering the United States’ intelligence gathering methods and the identity of American spies.
“She was a major player in the White House, a senator, and the secretary of state,” said one of the prosecutors. “She knew what was classified and what was not from a mile away, whether it was marked classified or not.”
“She was briefed and signed an official affidavit that she understood how to handle classified material,” said another prosecutor. “Apparently, she didn’t give a flying fuck.”
“If you go by the letter of the law, she broke several of them,” said an agent.
“Yeah, but no jury’s going to convict the nominee of the Democratic Party without proof that she acted with criminal intent,” said a prosecutor. “And that just ain’t going to happen.”
“What about Title 18?” one of the agents asked.
He was referring to 18 U.S.C. § 1001, which prohibited knowingly and willingly making false or fraudulent statements, or concealing information. Many agents believed that Hillary and her top aides—Huma Abedin, Cheryl Mills, and Jake Sullivan—had misled the FBI by making materially false statements, which was punishable by a stiff fine and several years in jail.
“Dennis Hastert [the former speaker of the House], Rod Blagojevich [the former governor of Illinois], and Martha Stewart were all sent to jail for lying to the FBI,” an agent pointed out.
“But Hillary isn’t Martha Stewart,” a prosecutor replied. “She doesn’t write cookbooks and give tips on entertaining. She’s the next fucking president of the United States.”
“Not if we can help it,” a slightly inebriated FBI agent said.
On this particular Friday night, the agents and the prosecutors were packed three deep at the bar when there was a sudden rustle of activity at the front door. A flying wedge of Secret Service agents entered the room with Attorney General Loretta Lynch and her aides.
“The General has arrived,” said one of the bartenders.
The media had hung the nickname “the General” on attorneys general of the United States ever since Janet Reno held the post. Reno earned the nickname in part because of her imposing stature—she was 6-foot-2-inches tall—and in part because of her role in the FBI’s disastrous 1993 attack on the Branch Davidians’ compound in Waco, Texas, which Reno approved and which resulted in the deaths of four government agents and six Branch Davidians.
The barroom crowd parted for Lynch and her aides as they made their way to a table in the dining area. The Secret Service detail kept watch from a nearby table.
Cocktails, appetizers, and main courses all appeared on Lynch’s table without a word from her or her aides. Apparently, everything had been ordered in advance, or the chef was familiar with the General’s palate.
If anyone strayed near her table, the Secret Service shooed them away. But at one point, Lynch spotted an old friend, a judge with wide-ranging political connections, who was standing in the barroom schmoozing with agents and prosecutors, and she waved to him.
He went over to her table.
She nodded to the Secret Service agents that he was okay, but she didn’t get up to greet him.
Lynch had not been Obama’s first choice to succeed the controversial Eric Holder, who as attorney general had used a liberal litmus test to decide which laws he chose to enforce and which ones he chose to ignore. Holder and his wife were close personal friends of Barack and Michelle Obama, and Obama had allowed him to stay in his job long after he was held in contempt of Congress. Holder had been found guilty of stonewalling the investigation into Operation Fast and Furious in which federal agents sold weapons to gun dealers in the hope of tracking them to Mexican drug cartels. A U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent and several hundred Mexicans died as a result of the fatally flawed sting operation.
Obama wanted to replace Holder with another favorite, Kathryn Ruemmler, the White House Counsel, who had given the president legal cover to issue scores of executive orders that many legal scholars found blatantly unconstitutional. Ruemmler withdrew her name when it became apparent that the Republican-controlled Senate wouldn’t confirm her.
With Ruemmler out of the running, Loretta Lynch’s name rose to the top of Obama’s short list. She was a “two-fer”—an African American and a woman, as well as a prominent prosecutor. Lynch came highly recommended by the Reverend Al Sharpton. Over the years, Sharpton had managed to lose weight (he went from 305 pounds to 138) and shed his reputation (at least in liberal quarters) as a rabble-rousing con artist. When Lynch was the United States attorney for the Eastern District of New York, she befriended Sharpton, who had become the Obama White House’s go-to guy for issues related to black America.
Sharpton wasn’t shy about using his leverage when it came to appointing a new attorney general.
“We are engaged in immediate conversations with the White House on deliberations over a successor whom we hope will continue in the general direction of Attorney General Holder,” he said.
Sharpton gave his blessing to Lynch. Her nomination process dragged on for 166 days, making it one of the longest in U.S. history. She was finally confirmed as the eighty-third attorney general of the United States on April 23, 2015.
Lynch followed in Eric Holder’s hard-left footsteps. She filed a lawsuit against North Carolina over its law that required people to use public bathrooms that matched their actual biological sex, not the “gender” they identified with. And she sued the federal Election Assistant Commission over its decision to allow states to require people to provide IDs when they registered to vote.
“I think that she has shown in an understated way, but with loud ramifications,” said Sharpton, “that she is no one who shrinks from the legacy of Robert Kennedy or Eric Holder.”
Standing just five feet tall, Lynch was not an imposing figure. She was fourteen inches shorter than Janet Reno, and she and her husband, Stephen Hargrove, who worked at Showtime, did not dine at the White House with the Obamas as had Holder and his obstetrician wife, Dr. Sharon Malone. But in the gathering storm between Barack Obama and FBI Director James Comey, Loretta Lynch was without doubt the president’s commanding general.