Last week, the FBI made its recommendation to the Justice Department not to prosecute Hillary Clinton for her handling of classified information while secretary of state. Attorney General Loretta Lynch quickly accepted it, announcing that she was officially closing the case with no charges filed.

In theory, of course, Lynch could have rejected the bureau’s recommendation. The FBI investigates alleged criminality and recommends to department prosecutors how they might proceed in a given case. The prosecutors aren’t bound by the bureau’s recommendations. But here, with FBI director James Comey saying that no reasonable prosecutor could bring a case against Clinton, it was hard to imagine that a Justice Department under Loretta Lynch would disagree with Comey and seek an indictment.