Thought AG tilted e-mail probe for Hill

Ousted FBI Director James Comey said Thursday that he suspected then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch was in cahoots with the Hillary Clinton campaign last summer.

Testifying before the Senate intelligence committee Wednesday, Comey said Lynch told him not to refer to the probe into Clinton’s private e-mail server as an “investigation.”

“She said just call it a ‘matter.’ That concerned me because that language tracked how the campaign was talking about the FBI’s work,” he said, adding that the request made him feel “queasy.”

Comey said it made him feel Lynch was trying to match the wording the Clinton campaign was using to describe the FBI probe.

“I don’t know whether it was intentional or not. But it gave the impression that the attorney general was trying to align how we describe our work with the way it was being described in a political campaign,” he said.

Uncomfortable as he was, the former FBI boss followed orders.

“It was inaccurate. We had an investigation open for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, we had an investigation open at the time,” he testified.

He predicted the press would ignore the difference “and that’s what happened.”

Comey also said ex-President Bill Clinton’s surprise meeting with Lynch on a jet parked on the tarmac at the Phoenix airport last June prompted him to go public with results of the FBI probe into the e-mail server.

“That was the thing that capped it for me, that I had to do something separately to protect the credibility of the investigation, which meant both the FBI and the Justice Department,” Comey said.

He announced last July that criminal charges against Clinton were not warranted, angering Republicans.

The former G-man said he didn’t call for an independent counsel to probe Hillary’s e-mail because there was no evidence that any crime had been committed — just sloppiness.

“After former President Clinton met on the plane with [Lynch], I considered whether I should call for the appointment of a special counsel and decided that that would be an unfair thing to do because I knew there was no case there,” Comey said in response to a question from Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), who had repeatedly called for a special counsel last year.

“We had investigated very, very thoroughly. I know this is a subject of passionate disagreement. But I knew there was no case there. Calling for the appointment of special counsel would be brutally unfair and would send the message there’s something here.”

Lynch told CNN in July she did “regret sitting down and having a conversation with [Bill Clinton], because it did give people concern,” she said.