James Comey: Loretta Lynch Ordered Me to Downplay Hillary Clinton’s Criminal Investigation
Former FBI Director James Comey revealed on Thursday that former Obama Attorney General Loretta Lynch — the same Loretta Lynch that infamously met Bill Clinton on a tarmac “coincidentally” in Phoenix while Hillary Clinton was under investigation for crimes committed in the EmailGate scandal — ordered him to use Hillary Clinton campaign talking points.
Under questioning by Senator James Lankford , Comey revealed that Lynch — his boss — ordered him to downplay what Comey called an open “criminal investigation” against Hillary Clinton by reducing it to the more innocent-sounding “matter” that was being looked into:
“The Clinton campaign at the time was using all kinds of euphemisms, ‘security review,’ ‘matters,’ things like that for what was going on. We were getting to a place where the attorney general and I were both going to testify and talk publicly about it. And I wanted to know, was she going to authorize us to confirm we had an investigation. And she said ‘yes,’ but ‘Don’t call it that. Call it a matter.’
And I say ‘Why would you do that?’ and she said ‘Just call it a matter.’”
Comey told Senator Lankford that in hindsight he wonders if he should have resisted the order but decided that it wasn’t a “hill worth dying on.”
“That concerned me because that language tracked the way the campaign was talking about the FBI’s work and that’s concerning,” Comey confessed.
“It gave the impression that the campaign was somehow using the same language as the FBI because you were handed the campaign language” Lankford interjected.
“It gave the impression that the attorney general was looking to align the way we talked about our work with the way a political campaign was describing the same activity which was inaccurate.
“We had a criminal investigation open, as I’ve said before, with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. We had an open investigation open at the time and so that gave me a queasy feeling.”
Comey also revealed that many of the news accounts he hears from the media about so-called collusion with Russia by either the president or his campaign are wrong.
“There have been many, many stories — purportedly based on classified information about lots of stuff, but especially about Russia that are just dead wrong,” he told Lankford.
Considering that the Department of Justice, which is supposed to be non-political, colluded with the Hillary Clinton political campaign and interfered with a federal investigation, is highly troubling. The fact, according to Comey’s under oath testimony, that Loretta Lynch bullied him into lying about the characterization of a “criminal investigation,” must have had a chilling effect on the investigation.
It’s no wonder Hillary Clinton was let off the hook. The Department of Justice was on her side.
Watch the exchange below:
