"I wish I had seen around that corner and not had that discussion with the former president, as innocuous as it was," Loretta Lynch said. | AP Photo Lynch says she 'regrets' June conversation with Bill Clinton

Attorney General Loretta Lynch said Sunday she regrets meeting with former President Bill Clinton on an airport tarmac during the height of Hillary Clinton's email investigation.

"I do regret sitting down and having a conversation with him, because it did give people concern. And as I said, my greatest concern has always been making sure that people understand that the Department of Justice works in a way that is independent and looks at everybody equally," Lynch told Jake Tapper on CNN's "State of the Union."


"It was painful for me, and so I felt it was important to clarify it as quickly and as clearly and as cleanly as possible," she said.

On June 28, Bill Clinton met with Lynch on her private plane, a meeting that Lynch said at the time was "primarily social." The two had found themselves nearby on the tarmac at an Arizona airport.

Lynch said in her interview with Tapper: "I wish I had seen around that corner and not had that discussion with the former president, as innocuous as it was, because it did give people concern."

"It did make people wonder is it going to affect the investigation that's going on, and that's not something that was an unreasonable question for anyone to ask."

When asked by Tapper about an op-ed last week by Hillary Clinton campaign manager John Podesta, who wrote that he was "surprised to read in the New York Times that when the FBI discovered the Russian attack in September of 2015 it failed to send even a single agent to warn senior DNC officials," Lynch said she could not discuss the ongoing investigation.

She did, however, say "the FBI has worked closely with those organizations both to discuss what we learned about the hacks and to gather information about them so that we can continue this investigation."

Tapper pushed Lynch on whether the degree of urgency investigators gave to the hack might make Podesta's description accurate.

"I can tell you that this investigation was taken seriously from the beginning. This is an incredibly serious issue. I can't comment on Mr. Podesta's sources or where he gets his information. Or why he has that view," she said. "But what I can say is that he's not involved in the ongoing investigation, so he wouldn't be privy to everything that would have been done or said to that."

On the alleged Russian hacks, Lynch said: "It requires and calls for the study and review that the president has directed all of us who are in the intelligence community or affiliated with it [to] undertake."

"It is an issue that people are concerned about and do need to have information about," she said. "Our goal is to provide them with the information. That is thoroughly investigated, fully vetted, and that we can provide in an open setting."