Former Attorney General Loretta Lynch slammed ex-FBI Director James Comey for his accusation that she aligned the FBI’s terminology on the Hillary Clinton email case with Democratic messaging.
“I have known James Comey almost 30 years,” Lynch wrote in a statement Sunday. “Throughout his time as director we spoke regularly about some of the most sensitive issues in law enforcement and national security. If he had any concerns regarding the email investigation, classified or not, he had ample opportunities to raise them with me both privately and in meetings. He never did.”
In his book, “A Higher Loyalty,” Comey describes a September 2015 meeting with Lynch in which the then-attorney general asked him to describe the investigation into Clinton’s emails as a “matter.”
“It occurred to me in the moment that this issue of semantics was strikingly similar to the fight the Clinton campaign had waged against The New York Times in July. Ever since then, the Clinton team had been employing a variety of euphemisms to avoid using the word ‘investigation,’” Comey writes.
“The attorney general seemed to be directing me to align with the Clinton campaign strategy. Her ‘just do it’ response to my question indicated that she had no legal or procedural justification for her request, at least not one grounded in our practices or traditions. Otherwise, I assume, she would have said so.”
Comey added many people in the FBI who were with him in the meeting saw her request as political as well.
“I know the FBI attendees at our meeting saw her request as overtly political when we talked about it afterward. So did at least one of Lynch’s senior leaders. George Toscas, then the number-three person in the department’s National Security Division and someone I liked, smiled at the FBI team as we filed out, saying sarcastically, ‘Well you are the Federal Bureau of Matters,’” Comey recalled.
Lynch denied her comments as being political.
“Over two decades as a federal prosecutor, I have aggressively prosecuted drug dealers, violent gangs, mobsters, and money launderers, upheld the civil rights of all Americans, and fought corruption of all types — whether by elected officials from both sides of the aisle or within organizations like FIFA,” she said. “Through it all I have never hesitated to make the hard decisions, guided by the Department of Justice’s core principles of integrity, independence and above all, always doing the right thing.”
She added, “The Justice Department’s handling of the Clinton email investigation under my leadership was no exception. It was led by a team of non-partisan career prosecutors whose integrity cannot be overstated and whom I trusted to assess the facts and make a recommendation — one that I ultimately accepted because I thought the evidence and law warranted it.”
“Everyone who works for the Department of Justice has an obligation to protect the confidentiality and integrity of the work of the Department. That is why, at the critical early stages of this case, I followed the Department’s long-standing policy of neither confirming nor denying the fact of an ongoing investigation. This policy both predates my tenure in the department and will live on long after the current debate is over. It neither misleads nor misinforms, but instead both protects investigations and guarantees equal treatment of those under scrutiny, whether well-lnown or unknown. Any suggestion that I invoked this bedrock policy for any other reason is simply false.”
She continued, “Throughout the process I did what I always do: rise above politics and uphold the law. At no time did I ever discuss any aspect of the investigation with anyone from the Clinton campaign or the DNC.”
