It now appears that the FBI has been investigating the Bill and Hillary Clinton Foundation for more than a year. This casts the informal meeting last summer on an airplane between Bill Clinton and Loretta Lynch in an even worse light than before. As one reader puts it:

It would seem rather inappropriate [for Attorney General Lynch] to be meeting with someone without staff if the person is not just the husband of a subject of an FBI investigation, but actually a subject (or head of a subject) under FBI investigation.

Indeed.

Keep in mind too that, according to multiple reports, the Justice Department has been pushing back hard against the FBI investigation of the Clinton Foundation. For example, when agents on the Foundation case sought emails contained on non-government laptops that had been searched as part of the Clinton email case, prosecutors in the Eastern District rejected the request.

As Andy McCarthy has pointed out, the Eastern District of New York was headed by Loretta Lynch until she became Attorney General less than two years ago. The prosecutors who said no to the FBI were Lynch’s people.

When Lynch met with Bill Clinton, she would have known that the email investigation was just about over, but that the Clinton Foundation investigation was ongoing. If they discussed DOJ activities on the Clinton front, as Bill surely desired to, it’s likely that both investigations came up.

In any event, the existence of the Foundation investigation makes the appearance of impropriety even more glaring.

Just after news of the airplane meeting broke, Lynch said that she would defer to James Comey’s determination on whether to prosecute in the email case. She should now bow out of any role in determining the course or outcome of the Clinton Foundation investigation.