This week's surprise private meeting between former President Bill Clinton and current Attorney General Loretta Lynch (accompanied by her husband) on board a private jet parked on the tarmac at a Phoenix airport has already been fantasized about by the usual suspects. But have they missed the most important connection?
Ms. Lynch, as U.S. attorney general, will soon make the decision whether to prosecute Hillary Clinton for making classified State Department emails available to our nation's enemies via hackers, and perhaps for using the State Department to round up donations from foreign dictators to fatten the Clinton Foundation's coffers. Russia has already announced they have Hillary's emails, which Vladimir Putin (who came up through Soviet Mideast KGB ranks) has said he will release at least partially, soon.
Most commentary has focused on versions of "the fix is in" and stressed that Hillary will not be prosecuted for what others would already have a lifetime reservation at Gitmo for.
The meeting was highly unusual, certainly improper and intended to be entirely private. The former two conditions, unusual and improper, are nothing new to Washington, D.C. But anyone who thinks meetings today are private is, shall we say, disconnected.
First, though, let's introduce a "third way forward" for Corporation Clinton. Did Attorney General Lynch initiate the meeting as a courtesy to a former president and her early career mentor when she was in his administration? Scattered amidst talk of the grandchildren and memories of old times, did words to this effect pass between them: "There's too much already out there in the public record on your wife, Mr. President. I can't hold it all back. I'm not going to take the fall that would come with failure to indict."
Of course, I could be wrong, just like everybody else. But if that's the case, I wonder why FBI agents on the ground around the parked airplane were demanding no pictures, no video, no microphones of reporters around the airplane? The meeting was never announced – and never intended to be public – ever. It was just stumbled across by a Phoenix television station that happened to be at that airport.
Now, about privacy in the digital age, and especially when around the FBI. The plane would have been checked for security purposes by the Secret Service or FBI or both prior to being used as a meeting room. Perhaps looking for a recording or transmitting device? Perhaps … leaving one?
Three people attended the meeting. All likely had cell phones. All likely had an interest in having a record of the conversation. Or did the FBI physically search a former president, the attorney general of the United States and her husband – and confiscate their cellular phones before allowing them to board the plane?
People have already been convicted of crimes based on conversations recorded by their own cellphones.
This is all just speculation, of course. At least right now. It really depends upon what the conversation was about and who had the greatest motivation to record it and what exactly the meaning of "is" is – doesn't it? Entirely for posterity, of course.
Who's exposing all this?
Media wishing to interview Craige McMillan, please contact [email protected].
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