FBI Finds 30 Pages of Documents on Clinton-Lynch Tarmac Meeting

After insisting it had no documents related to former President Bill Clinton’s infamous tarmac meeting with then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch, the FBI this week acknowledged that was not true.

Judicial Watch had filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit in an attempt to learn more about the June 2016 meeting, described by both the former president and Lynch as a friendly, impromptu chat about grandchildren as their planes waited on the tarmac of the airport in Phoenix.

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The meeting raised suspicions of conservatives since it occurred in the middle of the FBI’s investigation of Clinton’s wife, Hillary Clinton, over her handling of classified information during her tenure as secretary of state.

The FBI originally told Judicial Watch that it did not have any records related to the tarmac meeting.

“Upon further review, we subsequently determined potentially responsive documents may exist,” the department said in explaining that it has reopened the FOIA case.

The FBI has asked a judge for six weeks to turn over 30 pages of material to Judicial Watch.

“The FBI is out of control. It is stunning that the FBI ‘found’ these Clinton-Lynch tarmac records only after we caught the agency hiding them in another lawsuit,” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said in a statement. “Judicial Watch will continue to press for answers about the FBI’s document games in court. In the meantime, the FBI should stop the stonewall and release these new records immediately.”

On June 27, 2016, Attorney General Loretta Lynch met privately with former President Bill Clinton on board a parked private plane at Sky Harbor International Airport in Phoenix. The meeting occurred during the investigation of Mrs. Clinton’s email server, and mere hours before the Benghazi report was released publicly involving both Mrs. Clinton and the Obama administration. Judicial Watch filed a request on June 30 that the U.S. Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General investigate that meeting.

The Judicial Watch lawsuit also forced the FBI to make public its Clinton investigative file, although more than half of the records remain withheld. The FBI has indicated that it anticipates completing the processing of these materials by July 2018, according to Judicial Watch.

Judicial Watch wants the records in order to examine whether the FBI and the Justice Department gave Hillary Clinton and other witnesses preferential treatment during the probe.

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The Obama administration gave immunity to Clinton’s former chief of staff, Cheryl Mills; John Bentel, former director of the State Department’s Office of Information Resources Management; Heather Samuelson, Clinton’s executive assistant; Brian Pagliano, an information technology employee at the State Department who serviced the Clinton non-government server; and an employee at Platt River Networks, the company that maintained it.

Judicial Watch also pointed to a $500,000 contribution by a political action committee aligned with Virginia Gov. and longtime Clinton friend Terry McAuliffe to state Senate candidate Jill McCabe, the wife of Andrew McCabe, who was in charge of the FBI’s Washington field office.

Judicial Watch has filed several lawsuits seeking information about McCabe’s role in the probe.

(photo credit, homepage image: Attorney General Loretta Lynch…, CC BY-ND 2.0, by U.S. Embassy London ; photo credit, article image: Bill Clinton, faded, CC BY-SA 2.0, by Gage Skidmore / Loretta Lynch…, faded, CC BY 2.0, by US Department of Labor)