The Executive Terminal at Phoenix Sky Harbor
International Airport
Monday, June 27, 2016
Bill Clinton’s private jet was cleared for takeoff and was taxiing toward the active runway when a Secret Service agent informed him that Attorney General Loretta Lynch’s plane was coming in for a landing.
“Don’t take off!” Bill barked.
As his plane skidded to a halt and then headed back to its parking space, Bill grabbed a phone and called an old friend—one of his most trusted legal advisers.
“Bill said, ‘I want to bushwhack Loretta,’” the adviser recalled in an interview for this book.a “‘I’m going to board her plane. What do you think?’ And I said, ‘There’s no downside for you, but she’s going to take a pounding if she’s crazy enough to let you on her plane.’
“He knew it would be a huge embarrassment to Loretta when people found out that she had talked to the husband of a woman—the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party—who was under criminal investigation by the FBI,” the adviser continued. “But he didn’t give a damn. He wanted to intimidate Loretta and discredit [FBI Director James] Comey’s investigation of Hillary’s emails, which was giving Hillary’s campaign agita.”
Bill hung up the phone and turned to a Secret Service agent.
“As soon as her plane lands,” he said, “get the attorney general on the phone and say the president would like to have a word with her.”
Several minutes later, Loretta Lynch came on an encrypted phone line.
Lynch owed the former president big time. Seventeen years before, he had appointed her U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, one of the highest profile prosecutorial posts in the country. Now, the man who had made her career was on the phone inviting himself to visit her on her plane, and Lynch couldn’t bring herself to say no.
Bill walked across the seventy-five yards that separated his plane from hers. It was 108 degrees in Phoenix, and Bill later recalled that he could feel the heat through the soles of his shoes.
Meanwhile, his Secret Service detail and Lynch’s uniformed FBI agents were frantically scurrying around her plane, trying to secure the area. They ordered everyone to put away cell phones. No pictures of this meeting would be allowed.
Bill shook hands with Lynch’s agents and nodded to the Air Force pilot standing at attention at the bottom of the stairs.
“He told me he bounded up the stairs of her plane on pure adrenalin,” Bill’s adviser said. “It brought out the old fighter in him. During Hillary’s campaign, he’d been feeling weak; he didn’t have the fire in his belly. But his fury over the FBI witch-hunt of his wife, whom he loves with a passion despite all the shit he gets up to—that infuriated him. You can say anything you want about him, and he’ll let it go. But attack his wife, and he’ll try to destroy you.”
Once inside Lynch’s plane, Bill turned on the Clinton charm. He gave Lynch’s shoulder an affectionate squeeze and shook hands with her husband, Stephen Hargrove.
“Bill said he could tell that Loretta knew from the get-go that she’d made a huge mistake,” his adviser said. “She was literally trembling, shaking with nervousness. Her husband tried to comfort her; he kept patting her hand and rubbing her back.
“Bill made small talk about golf and grandchildren and [former Attorney General] Janet Reno, and he kept at it for nearly a half hour. It didn’t make any difference what they talked about; all he wanted to do was send a message to everyone at Justice and the FBI that Hillary had the full weight of the Clinton machine, the Democratic Party, and the White House behind her.
“It was clearly tortuous for Loretta. Bill told me later that he noticed there were beads of sweat on her upper lip.
“Like all attorneys general, Loretta is accustomed to being treated as royalty wherever she goes, but here she was sitting in her plane, entirely helpless, being intimidated by this wickedly clever old coyote, who had bushwhacked her on the Arizona desert.”
Aspen Ideas Festival, Aspen, Colorado
Friday, July 1, 2016
On the final day of the Aspen Institute’s annual summer get-together for self-congratulating liberal elites, Jonathan Capehart, a member of the Washington Post editorial board and an MSNBC contributor, interviewed Attorney General Loretta Lynch.
It was four days since the airport encounter between Lynch and Bill Clinton, and in the public furor that ensued, everyone—Democrats and Republicans alike—agreed that the meeting had seriously compromised the FBI’s investigation into Hillary’s use of an unsecure private email system when she was secretary of state.
Capehart and Lynch sat on a raised stage, a few feet apart—the thin, wiry journalist dressed incongruously in a dark wintry suit; the attorney general in a black dress, pink jacket, and a double strand of pearls.
“You have a reputation of having the highest integrity, utmost, solid judgment,” Capehart began. “. . . A lot of people were like. . . friends, supporters, backers, are saying, ‘What on earth was she thinking?’ talking to Bill Clinton?”
“Well, I think that’s the question of the day, isn’t it?” Lynch replied, visibly squirming in her chair. “. . . Certainly my meeting with him raises questions and concerns, and so, believe me, I completely get the question. . . .”
She then launched into a long explanation of the process.
“. . . So back to my first question,” Capehart pressed Lynch. “The what-were-you-thinking question.”
Lynch giggled nervously, but didn’t reply.
“But let me put a different spin on it, and ask,” Capehart continued. “When you’re on your plane . . . and knowing how the protocol works . . . you’re on your plane and in walks the former president of the United States. What were you thinking?”
After some back and forth, a crescendo of laughter rose from the audience as Capehart—pretending to be Lynch talking to Clinton—said, “‘Get off my plane! What are you doing here?’”
Lynch laughed along with the audience in an effort to hide her humiliation.
“That team [career Justice Department agents and investigators, reviewed by the FBI] will make findings . . .,” she said earlier in the conversation, “and I fully expect to accept their recommendations.”
With those words, she effectively recused herself from the case. But Capehart wasn’t satisfied.
“Do you regret not telling the former president of the United States to leave the premises?” he asked. “. . . And so of course, what’s happened as a result of this, there are people out there in the world who are saying, ‘See, this is an example of the system that’s rigged against the rest of us.’”
Meet the Press
Sunday, July 3, 2016
Andrea Mitchell: I was told that there was a possible plan for [Hillary] to fly in on Tuesday with . . . Obama [for a campaign appearance] to North Carolina on Air Force One, the full embrace, the picture.
Chuck Todd: So Hillary Clinton would have been on Air Force One with Obama, walking down.
Mitchell: No, coming out of the—
Todd: Off the—
Mitchell: —the door of the plane opens, there are two of them, arm in arm.
Todd (sounding incredulous): Not now [in the midst of the FBI investigation]!
Mitchell (explaining): . . .It really makes it hard for the president while [the FBI investigation of Hillary] is pending from his Justice Department.
Interview with a source close to presidential consigliere Valerie Jarrettb
Monday, July 4, 2016
“Obama wouldn’t have invited Hillary to fly with him to North Carolina and let her use two of the greatest symbols of presidential power—Air Force One and the podium with the seal of the president of the United States—if he thought there was even the slightest chance she was going to be indicted. But Loretta Lynch had been assuring him and Valerie for weeks that the prosecutors at Justice would never let that happen, and that the fix was in.
“A lot of people thought Jim Comey didn’t give a shit about the prosecutors at Justice or the political fallout, that he was hell-bent on indicting Hillary, that he was the Eliot Ness of his time—squeaky clean and untouchable.
“But that was a complete misreading of Comey, who’s a complicated guy. Yeah, he comes across as a straight arrow, but you don’t get to be director of the FBI by falling off the turnip truck. It takes huge drive and ambition and an instinct for political survival. And Comey knew that if he recommended an indictment of Hillary—something that was fiercely opposed by the president, the attorney general, the Democrats in Congress, and the liberal media—if he did that, he’d ignite a firestorm and go down in history as the man who traumatized the country’s political system. And if, after all of that, Hillary was ultimately found not guilty by a jury, it would blacken Comey’s reputation for all time to come.”
J. Edgar Hoover Building, Washington, D.C.
11 a.m., Tuesday, July 5, 2016
Dressed in a blue shirt and gold tie, which matched the colors of the FBI flag standing behind his lectern, the dark bags under his eyes masked by TV makeup, James Comey methodically laid out a bill of indictment against Hillary Clinton.
To the press assembled in the FBI auditorium, and the millions watching on TV at home, Comey said that despite Hillary’s claim that no classified information had passed through her email system, in fact 110 of the 30,000 emails that Hillary handed over to the State Department contained information that was classified at the time she sent or received them.
He said that “a very small number” bore markings that identified them as classified—another fact at odds with Hillary’s frequent statements that none of the emails were marked classified.
He said that Hillary “used her personal email extensively while outside the United States, including sending and receiving work-related emails in the territory of sophisticated adversaries,” and that it was therefore “possible that hostile actors gained access to Secretary Clinton’s email account.”
He said that “there is evidence to support a conclusion that any reasonable person in Secretary Clinton’s position . . . should have known that an unclassified system was no place for that conversation.”
He said that Hillary and her top aides at the State Department—Huma Abedin, Cheryl Mills, and Jake Sullivan—had been “extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.”
On and on he went, for a full ten minutes, making an ironclad case that Hillary was guilty of gross negligence in her handling of classified material, and that she had violated a federal statute that did not require evidence of intent to prove her guilty.
The reporters in the room—and the millions watching at home—had every reason to expect that Comey was going to recommend an indictment of Hillary Clinton.
Robert F. Kennedy Department of Justice, Washington, D.C.
11:06 a.m., Tuesday, July 5, 2016
Loretta Lynch certainly thought so.
The attorney general sat in her office, along with her top aides, watching Comey deliver his blistering rebuke of Hillary Clinton.
Lynch had promised President Obama and Valerie Jarrett that Hillary would not be indicted, but here was the director of the FBI on national TV laying out what appeared to be an unassailable case for prosecuting her.
How could this have happened?
What had gone wrong?
Would she be forced to resign?
All these thoughts went through Lynch’s mind, as she later recalled to a friend, as she listened to Comey drone on.
She was livid.
Finally, she couldn’t stand to watch him anymore.
She covered her eyes with her hands and let out a string of curses aimed at Jim Comey.
J. Edgar Hoover Building, Washington, D.C.
11:14 a.m., Tuesday, July 5, 2016
And then, three quarters of the way through his news conference, Comey dropped a bombshell.
The FBI, he said, would not recommend that criminal charges be brought against Hillary for her handling of classified information. There was no evidence, he said, that Hillary had intentionally transmitted or willfully mishandled secret documents in order to harm the United States.
“Our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case.”
The assembled reporters sat in stunned silence.
For months, one conservative commentator after another had predicted that the Democratic president in the White House would never permit his appointed attorney general to go along with a recommendation to indict his party’s presumptive presidential nominee. However, there were many liberals, both in and out of the mainstream media, who disagreed with this cynical forecast.
These people had drunk the James Comey Kool-Aid. They had, in the words of the Wall Street Journal’s Kimberley A. Strassel, “drooled over” the erstwhile Eliot Ness. They fervently believed Comey would do the right thing. Hillary was clearly guilty as sin, and the right thing would have been for Comey not only to say so—which he did—but to make her pay for her sins.
But he didn’t.
And nothing since the O. J. Simpson not guilty verdict in 1995 left so many Americans doubting the words engraved on the portico of the United States Supreme Court building: Equal Justice Under Law.
The Wall Street Journal was blunt. In an editorial headlined “Jim Comey’s Clinton Standard” and subtitled “He shows how she broke the law and then rationalizes no indictment,” the paper argued:
The rule of law requires its neutral application. We almost wish Mr. Comey had avoided his self-justifying, have-it-both-ways statement and said bluntly that he couldn’t indict Mrs. Clinton because the country must be spared a Donald Trump Presidency. It would have been more honest and less corrosive to democracy than his Clinton Standard.
Typically, Donald Trump was blunter still:
The system is rigged. . . .
a The source, who has been close to Bill Clinton for four decades, was interviewed twenty-five times for this book.
b The source, who has known Valerie Jarrett since her undergraduate days at Stanford University, was interviewed twelve times for this book.