The easiest explanation for why Attorney General Loretta Lynch met privately this week with Bill Clinton is that the former president is a “really social guy,” Bloomberg News’ Mark Halperin explained Friday.
“The most obvious explanation and probably the right one, is Bill Clinton is a really social guy, right?” Halperin said in an NBC News interview. “And we’ve all seen situations where famous people on the tarmac, the two planes, it’s kind of fun, ‘Hey, let’s go over and visit.'”
Lynch met with Clinton aboard her private plane in Arizona Monday evening for an off-the-record exchange that likely would have gone unnoticed were it not for the watchful eye of a local ABC News affiliate, KNXV-TV.
The attorney general confirmed the private exchange Wednesday, but maintained it was purely social.
The meeting has been criticized as inappropriate, given that the Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton is under FBI investigation for her use of an unauthorized and unsecured private email server when she worked at the State Department.
Following immediately on the heels of criticism for her conversation with Clinton, Lynch said Friday that she would go along with whatever recommendation the FBI comes up with in its investigation of the former secretary of state’s private emails. The aim was to remove any doubt over whether politics was seeping into the decision.
Halperin explained Friday that Lynch’s private interaction with Clinton likely doesn’t help the Democratic presidential candidate or the appearance of an impartial investigation.
“Mark, to the optics of this, the Clintons know better than anyone else what this — the appearance in the divisive world we live in. Why this error? Why this unnecessary meeting?” asked MSNBC’s Tamron Hall.
NBC News’ Matt Lauer added, “This plays right into the narrative that a lot of Republicans, and many Democrats as well, have about — or have been using with the Clintons. That they play by their own set of rules and that they’re above everything. This doesn’t help her.”
Halperin responded:
It doesn’t help. And again, it’s a totally — as [MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell] said — totally self-inflicted, and it puts the attorney general in a horrible position. That’s why she’s got to take this extraordinary step today. Yesterday she defended it, she said there was nothing to it. I’ll be really curious to see if she says she made a mistake today. President Clinton made a mistake and there was no reason for it, but the people who are critical of him will say he did this on purpose, that he did do this to try to influence the investigation. And there’s no way for him to — without a transcript of the conversation — there’s no way for him to prove to people that that’s not what this was about.
