Clinton dishes out fiction on Lynch meeting

The president wasn’t missing, only the truth was.

That’s just the title — “The President is Missing” — of Bill Clinton’s novel co-authored with best-selling mystery writer James Patterson. It is a thriller about a U.S. president who goes missing during a cyberattack on the U.S. It is fiction, although much of it is based on Clinton’s experience as president.

What also reads like fiction is Clinton’s testimony about his secret meeting with then-U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch on an airport tarmac in Phoenix. That took place while Hillary Clinton was under investigation for mishandling confidential emails as secretary of state.

Bill Clinton’s testimony is in a hardly noticed part of Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s 500-page report of the FBI’s investigation of Hillary Clinton. The investigation was a probe into her unauthorized use of an unsecured, private email server to conduct State Department business, as well as her deletion of some 30,000 emails that were under subpoena.

Bill Clinton’s “chance” 30-minute, unannounced meeting with Lynch aboard her government plane — at which they allegedly discussed golf and grandkids, and not the investigation — took place on June 27, 2016.

A week later, then FBI Director James Comey, who worked for Lynch, recommended that no charges be brought against Hillary, even though he concluded that she was “extraordinarily careless” in her handling of confidential emails. But Bill Clinton and Lynch would have you believe that, not only was their meeting a coincidence, the pair did not discuss Hillary Clinton.

An infuriated Lynch official later learned “that the former president’s Secret Service detail had contacted Lynch’s FBI security detail and let them know that the former president wanted to meet with Lynch,” the report said. However, other Lynch aides said they were never informed. The only time Hillary Clinton’s name came up, the former president said, was when he mentioned to Lynch that Hillary “was a happy grandmother.” He said they talked generally about grandchildren and golf and that at no time did the Hillary investigation or her pending FBI interview come up.

“It wouldn’t have been appropriate for me to talk to her about any of that and I didn’t,” Clinton said. Instead, he said, he boarded Lynch’s plane to tell her how lucky he and Hillary were because daughter Chelsea, her husband and grandchildren, lived close by, and how they sought to see them every week. Clinton said he told Lynch that while it was fun being a grandparent, he told Chelsea, “I still thought that being her father was the best gig I ever had.”

Bill Clinton testified that he did not know in advance that Lynch was in Phoenix and was not aware her government plane was 20 to 30 yards away from his on the tarmac until his staff told him so. He then barged aboard Lynch’s plane before a surprised Lynch could get off and join her staff who were waiting for her with limos.

Lynch said she was “very surprised” that Clinton wanted to meet with her “because they did not have a social relationship, and she was also surprised to see him ‘right there in the doorway’ so quickly,” the report said. Lynch said that she did not know Hillary either, and that she “never really had a conversation” with either of them. While Lynch and her husband thought the meeting was to be a simple “hello,” they could not get rid of Clinton, who kept the conversation going for close to a half hour while Lynch’s staff nervously waited on the tarmac.

Lynch’s deputy chief of staff was “shocked” by Clinton’s domineering behavior and that Clinton had completely “blindsided” Lynch by boarding the plane in the first place, considering the implications. Melanie Newman, the director of the Office of Public Affairs, told Horowitz that Lynch was “devastated” by the meeting. Lynch, she said, “doesn’t take mistakes lightly, and she felt like she had made ... an incredible ... mistake in judgment by saying yes instead of no that he could come on the plane.” Bill Clinton said he resented media criticism of him holding a secret meeting with Lynch, because it was, in his view, not secret, but a meeting held in “broad daylight.”

“I don’t know whether I’m more offended that they think I’m crooked or that they think I’m stupid,” Clinton said. If you buy Clinton’s baloney, you’ll love his next novel. It’s called “The President is Dishing.”