The journalist who broke the story about former Attorney General Loretta Lynch’s tarmac meeting with Bill Clinton on a hot summer’s day in 2016 doubts the former president’s claim that he played golf while in Phoenix.
That chance encounter on June 27, 2016, led to a firestorm of criticism, as it took place during the FBI’s investigation into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s use of an unauthorized email server and the presidential election in which she was the Democratic candidate. Lynch and Bill Clinton claim his wife’s emails were never discussed. Both say Clinton brought up golf, while Lynch said Clinton told her he had played golf during that particular trip to Arizona.
“To this day I have never found a single person who claims or corroborates any story that Bill Clinton played golf on this particular trip,” Christopher Sign, who was a morning anchor at ABC15 when he broke the story, told RealClearInvestigations. “I feel strongly the former president did not play golf on this visit.”
It’s a minor quibble, but one that lends itself to the broader appearance of impropriety amid an emails investigation. In fact, the tarmac meeting was the driving factor for then-FBI Director James Comey to do a press conference days later in which he recommended no criminal charges against Clinton but called her handling of classified information “extremely careless.”
Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz examined the tarmac meeting as part a review of the FBI’s emails probe. In a report released in June 2018, Horowitz said Clinton was in Phoenix for “several campaign events, including a roundtable discussion with Latino leaders and a campaign fundraiser, and his plane was preparing to depart” when he crossed paths with Lynch, whose plane had just arrived.
Sign, who is now an evening co-anchor for ABC 33/40 News in Birmingham, Ala., told Fox News in 2018 that he learned of the meeting from a “trusted source” and that a second individual confirmed it. A day after the tarmac meeting, Sign asked Lynch point blank about what she and Clinton discussed. Lynch said they discussed grandchildren, golf, travels, and other matters, but not the emails investigation.
Lynch said in a July 1 interview that she would not recuse herself from the Clinton emails investigation, but that she would accept the recommendation of the career agents and prosecutors who conducted it. This came after she had obtained an ethics opinion from the Departmental Ethics Office that she was not required to recuse herself.
Still, the inspector general report was critical of Lynch’s behavior. “Lynch’s statements created considerable public confusion about the status of her continuing involvement in the Midyear investigation,” the report said. “Although we found no evidence that Lynch and former President Clinton discussed the Midyear investigation or engaged in other inappropriate discussion during their tarmac meeting, we also found that Lynch’s failure to recognize the appearance problem created by former President Clinton’s visit and to take action to cut the visit short was an error in judgment. We further concluded that her efforts to respond to the meeting by explaining what her role would be in the investigation going forward created public confusion and did not adequately address the situation.”
In the report published this month that quotes Sign, RealClearInvestigations said it obtained a leaked copy of testimony Lynch gave to a joint task force of the House Judiciary and Oversight Committees last year and compared what she told lawmakers and their staff to what she and Clinton told the inspector general.
