Former attorney general Loretta E. Lynch is disputing former FBI director James Comey’s 2017 closed-door congressional testimony that she directed him to refer to the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server as “a matter.”
“I did not. I have never instructed a witness as to what to say specifically. Never have, never will,” Lynch told a joint task force of the House Oversight and Judiciary committees.
The transcript of the Dec. 19 interview, released Monday evening by House Judiciary ranking member Doug Collins, R-Ga., clashes with what Comey testified under oath
He told the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2017 that Lynch “directed” him to call the investigation a “matter” during a September 2015 meeting. Comey brought it up in the context of describing his decision to do a press conference in the summer of 2016 in which he recommended no criminal charges against Clinton but called her handling of classified information “extremely careless.”
“Probably the only other consideration that I guess I can talk about in open setting is that at one point the attorney general had directed me not to call it an investigation, but instead to call it a matter, which confused me and concerned me, but that was one of the bricks in the load that led me to conclude I have to step away from the department if we’re to close this case credibly,” he testified.
Comey added that he decided to do a press conference after Lynch’s secret Phoenix tarmac meeting with former President Bill Clinton in 2016 to handle optics as Hillary Clinton was a Democratic candidate for president at the time.
Comey also said that Lynch’s tarmac meeting cemented his assessment that she lacked independence.
In her testimony, Lynch said she only suggested to Comey that Justice Department policy dictated they were not at a point yet to publicly confirm an investigation.
“I didn’t direct anyone to use specific phraseology. When the Director asked me how to best to handle that, I said: What I have been saying is we have received a referral and we are working on the matter, working on the issue, or we have all the resources we need to handle the matter, handle the issue. So that was the suggestion that I made to him,” she said.
Lynch said she was “quite surprised” with how Comey would later describe their conversation “because that was not how it was conveyed to him, certainly not how it was intended.”
Lynch was also asked to respond to Comey’s book, A Higher Loyalty, which said the attorney general “seemed to be directing me to align with the Clinton campaign strategy” during that September meeting and that “the FBI didn’t do ‘matters.'”
“I wasn’t aware of the Clinton campaign strategy on anything, she said, adding that she was “not trying to align anyone on any issue.”
Source: Washington Examiner
Images: Fortune Conferences, Atlantic Council
