#1
In many quarters of the American news media today, seasoned journalists seem incapable of pondering those parts of reality that don’t complement their political worldviews. It goes beyond “bias”—we’re all biased. This is negligence.
Consider the trove of emails between FBI and Department of Justice officials published this week. The emails concern the June 27, 2016, meeting between former president Bill Clinton and then-attorney general Loretta Lynch. As readers may remember, Clinton paid an apparently impromptu visit to the attorney general aboard her DoJ plane while it was parked at Phoenix’s Sky Harbor airport. It was extremely improper for the two to meet for any reason. Clinton was the husband of the subject of an FBI investigation, and Lynch, as attorney general, had the ultimate authority over that investigation.
The meeting likely wouldn’t have made it into the news at all except for Christopher Sign, an industrious reporter with Phoenix’s ABC affiliate, who pursued the story and made it national news. Lynch eventually conceded that the meeting raised “questions and concerns.” At the time, though, she told Sign that she and the former president only discussed grandchildren, some golf Clinton played in Phoenix, and other such innocuous topics. Sign reported that “the FBI [was] there on the tarmac instructing everybody around ‘no photos, no pictures, no cell phones.’ ” That was strange, and it was strange, too, that no one was able to find any evidence that Clinton had played golf in Phoenix. This encounter and its suggestion of conflict of interest led FBI director James Comey to take the unorthodox step of holding a press conference on July 5, 2016, where he announced that the bureau’s investigation of Hillary Clinton’s use of a private server would not result in a recommendation to the Department of Justice to indict her. Comey later recalled that Attorney General Lynch had directed him not to call the investigation an “investigation” but instead to call it a “matter.” A direction, Comey said, that “confused me and concerned me.”
