A signal to the Clintons that all was good; the FBI had made its exoneration decision, and key investigators believed Lynch was aware.

The meeting between then Attorney General Loretta Lynch and Bill Clinton in Lynch’s jet on a tarmac at Phoenix airport on June 27, 2016, would have remained a secret if not discovered by a local news crew.

Our first post about the tarmac meeting was on June 29, 2016, Gross appearance of impropriety in AG Lynch private meeting with Bill Clinton:

What do you call an Attorney General who meets privately with the husband of a person under FBI investigation, and only discloses it when asked? Loretta Lynch…. Neither Lynch nor Bill Clinton are dummies. They both know that such a private meeting creates the appearance of impropriety regardless of what was discussed. Bill Clinton’s wife is being investigated by the FBI — why do you think he dropped in for a chat with Lynch? Of course they didn’t discuss the case. They didn’t need to. If there was no appearance of impropriety, why did Lynch wait until a local news crew, apparently tipped off, asked her about it? It feeds a narrative of the Clintons acting like the fix is in, with Hillary repeatedly bragging that there is no way she’s going to be indicted.

Hillary claimed, the day after her July 3, 2016 FBI interview, that the meeting was by chance, and she only learned of it in the news:

Well, I learned about it in the news. And it was a short, chance meeting at an airport tarmac. Both of their planes, as I understand it, were landing on the same tarmac at about the same time, and the attorney general’s husband was there, they said hello, they talked about grandkids, which is very much on our minds these days, golf, their mutual friend, former Attorney General Janet Reno, it was purely social. They did not veer off of speaking about those kinds of very common exchanges.

At the 2017 one-year anniversary of the tarmac meeting, I wrote about the impact of the tarmac meeting based on what was known as at the time:

The tarmac meeting set a number of events in motion that would shake the campaign, and remain issues. Then FBI Director James Comey, in light of the seeming impropriety of the meeting, took over the role that DOJ normally would play. While Lynch didn’t officially recuse herself, Comey took it on himself to announce that there would be no charges against Hillary Clinton. He would later testify that the meeting “made me worry that the department leadership could not credibly complete the investigation.” It also led to Comey’s letter just before the election announcing the investigation was restarted… The tarmac meeting, in Comey’s word, destroyed the credibility of DOJ, forcing him to act…. When Comey testified, after his firing, that Lynch told him not to use the term “investigation” when referring to the investigation of Hillary, that tarmac meeting once again became the context of possible collusion by Lynch to help Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

We now know a lot more about the sequence of events, which now strongly suggests that the tarmac meeting was not the start of events that led to the exoneration. Rather, it now appears that the tarmac meeting was the end of that process, the signal to the Clintons that all was taken care of.

The key facts we know now but did not know then are:

So what significance does the tarmac meeting take in this new context?

Remember, Lynch insisted that she and Clinton only talked about grandchildren and other non-investigation matters during that half hour conversation. That didn’t make sense if the tarmac meeting was the start of a collusive effort, there must have been something more.

But the tarmac meeting being only small talk does make sense if it was the end point, not the starting point. By then, it was clear within the FBI that Hillary would be exonerated, the statement already was drafted and re-drafted and reviewed, and Lynch likely knew it. Hillary’s interview, which was not under oath and not recorded, was a formality so the predetermined decision could assume the patina of legitimacy.

So the tarmac meeting very likely signaled to Hillary through Bill that all was good, that there was nothing to worry about regarding her upcoming FBI interview.

How would that signal take place? It could have been stated verbally, but more likely was the proverbial nod and wink. If anyone understands body language, it’s Bill Clinton. He didn’t need to be told in words, though we can’t rule that out.



