The journalist who broke the story about the controversial tarmac meeting between former President Bill Clinton and then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch said there is much the public does not know about the fateful encounter which shook the 2016 election.
Christopher Sign talked about his book on the Clinton-Lynch meeting, called Secret on the Tarmac, during an appearance Monday on Fox News.
The encounter on June 27, 2016, at the Phoenix’s Sky Harbor Airport 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. Both Bill Clinton and Lynch claim the email investigation was not brought up during their chat, but Sign, who was a morning anchor at the Phoenix-area ABC15 when he first reported their encounter, said there’s more to the story.
The book “details everything that they don’t want you to know and everything they think you forgot. But Bill Clinton was on that plane for 20 minutes, and it wasn’t just about golf, grandkids, and Brexit,” Sign said on Fox & Friends. “There’s so much that doesn’t add up.”
Sign said he spoke with an eye-witness to the meeting when Clinton “waited” on the tarmac of the airport for Lynch’s plane to land and taxi to a stop. Sign described confusion among the FBI and Secret Service officers about what Clinton and Lynch were doing.
“Most of her [Lynch’s] staff gets off [the airplane], he [Clinton] then gets on as the Secret Service and FBI are figuring out, ‘How in the world are we supposed to handle this? What are we supposed to do?'” Sign said.
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. In May 2019, Sign told RealClearInvestigations he was unable to find “a single person who claims or corroborates any story that Bill Clinton played golf on this particular trip,” and said, “I feel strongly the former president did not play golf on this visit.”
Clinton and Lynch met days before then-FBI Director James Comey announced the bureau would not recommend charges against Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton’s wife, for her emails. However, Comey called her handling of classified information “extremely careless.” Lynch said in a July 1 interview that she would not recuse herself from the Clinton email 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.
President Trump, then a candidate, tweeted his skepticism of Lynch’s claim that she and Clinton discussed nonconsequential matters such as how their grandchildren were doing.
Does anybody really believe that Bill Clinton and the U.S.A.G. talked only about “grandkids” and golf for 37 minutes in plane on tarmac?
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 3, 2016
Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz examined the tarmac meeting as part a review of the FBI’s emails investigation. 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. Horowitz also criticized Lynch for making statements that “created considerable public confusion” about her role in the emails investigation, although he said investigators found no evidence the email inquiry was discussed.
Sign told Fox News his family has received numerous death threats since he broke the story about the meeting in the lead up to the 2016 election.
“My family received significant death threats shortly after breaking this story,” Sign said on Monday. “Credit cards hacked. You know, my children, we have code words. We have secret code words that they know what to do.”
