The Great Smoky Mountain Journal
Staff Reports
Posted: Sunday, January 21, 2018 11:23 AM
FBI Reopens Request For Records From 2016 Tarmac Meeting Between Attorney General Loretta Lynch, Bill Clinton
American Center for Law and Justice President Jay Sekulow called the development a “positive sign,” in an interview Wednesday on “Fox & Friends.”
Sekulow said the FBI sent him a letter saying it had reopened his Freedom of Information Act request for documents related to the June 2016 meeting. At first, the FBI and DOJ said they did not have documents detailing the tarmac meet-up, before recently releasing a batch of emails. They are now searching for more records.
“While we appreciate that the FBI has ‘reopened’ the case file and is now ‘searching’ for documents responsive to our duly submitted FOIA request from more than a year ago, it stretches the bounds of credulity to suggest that the FBI bureaucracy just discovered that ‘potentially responsive’ records ‘may exist’ on its own accord,” Sekulow said in a written statement.
FBI’s newest letter to the ACLJ – dated one week after the government watchdog group accused the government of lying to them about the existence of records – now states that “records potentially responsive to your request may exist.”
Last week, ACLJ released 400 emails from the initial batch they received. The documents revealed that Lynch used an email alias to discuss the secret meeting that took place between her and Clinton and that DOJ staffers were concerned about the optics of the situation.
The tarmac meeting fueled Republican complaints at the time that Lynch had improperly met with the husband of an investigation subject, Hillary Clinton, just before the probe into her personal email use was completed with no charges filed.
A week after the meeting, then-FBI Director James Comey called Clinton’s actions “extremely careless” but did not recommend charges. The criminal investigation was closed and then briefly re-opened in October just days before the 2016 presidential election.
Sekulow, who also serves on President Trump’s legal team, said the ACLJ will continue to “press on in our legal fight to ensure that the details of the secret Clinton-Lynch meeting and the subsequent cover-up and withholding of information from the public comes to light.”