“Amid an ongoing investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of email and hours before the public release of the Benghazi report, US Attorney General Loretta Lynch met privately with former President Bill Clinton. The private meeting took place on the west side of Sky Harbor International Airport on board a parked private plane… Sources tell ABC15, Clinton was notified Lynch would be arriving at the airport soon and waited for her arrival.”

Knowing these facts, you’d expect that Loretta Lynch and Bill Clinton would avoid meeting secretly aboard private jets. Yet that’s exactly what happened in Phoenix this week:

The meeting lasted “around 30 minutes,” yet Lynch expects the American people to believe that Hillary Clinton’s criminal investigation never came up. Since the story broke of Lynch and Bill Clinton’s clandestine meeting, the reaction has been swift, harsh, and bi-partisanly negative.

President Obama’s former chief strategist David Axelrod took to Twitter, calling the Lynch-Clinton meeting “foolish”:

Senator Chris Coons (D-DE) also had harsh words concerning the Lynch and Clinton’s secret meeting. (I’m not saying, I’m just saying.) Speaking with CNN, the Delaware senator strongly condemned the Attorney General’s judgment:

“A Democratic senator said Thursday that Attorney General Loretta Lynch should not have held a private meeting with former President Bill Clinton this week. ‘I don’t think it sends the right signal. I think she should have steered clear even of a brief, casual, social meeting with the former president,’ Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) said on CNN’s ‘New Day.'”

The Morning Joe panel was equally unsparing of Lynch’s decision to meet secretly with the husband of someone currently under FBI investigation:

At the very least, Clinton and Lynch’s surreptitious meeting is awful, embarrassing optics for the Justice Department and its claims of objectivity; while at worst, this is a former president pressuring a former employee of his to not indict his wife. This incident calls into question whether the FBI will be allowed by the Department of Justice to follow the evidence in the Clinton criminal investigation. The only solution to this crisis is the appointment of a special prosecutor for the Clinton case. If Attorney General Lynch has any respect for the rule of law, she must act immediately.