Bill Clinton Hands the GOP a New Talking Point

Rick Klein: “What the heck were they thinking? Maybe they weren’t – and that’s the problem, of course. At the very least, the fact that a private meeting occurred between Attorney General Loretta Lynch and former President Bill Clinton was the product of a series of major errors in judgment. The former president and his team made a massive political error – an utterly unforced one – in not realizing how such an encounter, even a brief one, would be perceived in the summer of an election year. The attorney general and her team miscalculated the optics and perhaps the legality of the situation in allowing any such discussion, when everyone knows the FBI in the midst of an investigation of Hillary Clinton’s handling of her emails.”

“Lynch’s announcement that she would defer to the FBI’s recommendations on the case doesn’t resolve anything. (In what scenario would it have been alright for her to insert her judgment for the FBI’s?) Donald Trump gets a new and powerful talking point. Bill Clinton again shows how his immense value can easily be outweighed in the other direction. And Clinton campaign staffers in Brooklyn have every right to be as upset with all of this as career prosecutors in Washington.”