Bill Clinton wasn’t always ridiculed in the press for failing to grasp the MeToo movement, and he wasn’t always the subject of awkward conversations among Democrats about whether it’s time for him to go away.
A long time ago, in 2016, Democrats, and Democratic women in particular, just couldn’t say no to Clinton. The Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General issued a report providing several pages of evidence about how things used to be.
In June 2016, Clinton talked his way onto Attorney General Loretta Lynch’s plane to say “hello.” Lynch seemed to have places to go. She told the IG that she thought she would quickly greet Clinton and then be done with it.
But he lingered, as he tends to, and Lynch let him. Suddenly, Clinton was sitting down on the plane, settling in for a long chat.
“He picked up my tote bags and moved them, and then he sat down,” she said. “So he sat down, and my husband and I were still standing in front of him having the discussion.”
In other words, he persisted.
Lynch indicated to the IG that she was getting a little bored with Clinton and gently tried to end the conversation. But only gently … this was Bill Clinton, after all.
“I remember at that point saying, well, you know, thank you very much kind of thing, and he sort of continued chatting …” she said.
All the while, she told the IG, she wasn’t happy the conversation was happening. Republicans would later say it had the appearance of a conflict of interest, that Clinton was mounting a charm offensive on Lynch in an attempt to influence the ongoing investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server when she was secretary of state.
“She said that she became increasingly concerned as the meeting ‘went on and on,'” the report said. “Lynch said that when she thought about it later that evening and discussed it with her staff about in the context of the case, she concluded ‘that it was just too long a conversation to have had.'”
Lynch’s staff was even more worried. Her senior counselor know the “optics were not great.” Her deputy chief of staff was “shocked” at Bill Clinton’s visit. Another staff worried that pictures would be taken.
But still, they hemmed and hawed. Lynch’s senior counselor finally decided to try to end the meeting.
She was stopped by security, and she told security the meeting “was not a good idea,” the IG report said. The security person said, “Why don’t you tell her yourself?”
The senior counselor walked in, and Lynch introduced her to Bill Clinton. The counselor hoped that would be enough to end the meeting.
But it wasn’t. And when she had the chance to be rude and break it up, she buckled under the weight of Clinton’s celebrity status.
“So then … I kind of didn’t know what to do because … it was a little bit unusual to be in a room with … a former president and say … you need to leave …” she said, according to the IG report. “So … I think I stared at them for a little bit longer, and then went back to where [the head of Lynch’s security detail] was standing.”
She went back to try again and, this time, Lynch took the hint, and finally told Clinton, “We do have to go.”
But Clinton kept filibustering. Lynch said she repeated again that she had to go, “and then he kept talking about something else.”
Both knew immediately the meeting was a mistake.
“I kind of looked at her and … I think I said … something like that was not great, or … something like that,” the counselor said. “And she’s like, ‘Yeah.'”
Just 102 weeks ago, Bill Clinton was the man no Democrat could tell “no,” even when all the adults in the room knew they should.
Today, Bill Clinton only seems to be able to get attention for pitching his new novel and when he kicks the MeToo movement in the head by saying things like, the times have changed when it comes to “what you can do to somebody against their will.”
Even the title of Bill Clinton’s book is forgettable, until you realize how perfectly it sums up his situation: The President is Missing.
