Bombshell Clinton tell-all from Ed Klein, titled 'Guilty as Sin,' spells out how Bill Clinton charmed and intimidated Attorney General Loretta Lynch and extracted a promise that Hillary would never face criminal charges
By David Martosko | Daily Mail | October 4, 2016
Hillary Clinton was never in any danger of prosecution for mishandling classified documents on her infamous homebrew email server, according to a book set to rock the election season.
The fix was in, thanks to Bill Clinton's plan to ambush Attorney General Loretta Lynch when their private jets were at the Phoenix airport at the same time.
The former president told his pilot to abort a takeoff, according to Ed Klein in his latest book, 'Guilty as Sin,' when a Secret Service agent told him Lynch was about to land.
'Don't take off!' Bill shouted.
The meeting, which began minutes later and lasted a half-hour, took place just one week before FBI director James Comey announced publicly that the Democratic presidential nominee was in the clear.
One of Clinton's most trusted legal advisers told Klein that he took a call from the former president. The New York Post published a book excerpt spelling out what happened.
'Bill said, "I want to bushwhack Loretta",' the adviser told him. '"I'm going to board her plane. What do you think?"
'And I said, "There's no downside for you, but she's going to take a pounding if she's crazy enough to let you on her plane".'
'He knew it would be a huge embarrassment to Loretta when people found out that she had talked to the husband of a woman – the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party – who was under criminal investigation by the FBI,' the adviser explained to Klein.
'But he didn't give a damn. He wanted to intimidate Loretta and discredit Comey's investigation of Hillary's emails, which was giving Hillary's campaign agita.'
Bill Clinton ended up telling his Secret Service agent to call Lynch and set up a meeting on the tarmac.
The adviser, who was not on the plane, said Clinton told him later that he noticed 'beads of sweat' on Lynch's upper lip as she and her husband listened to the former president talk – sending a message that Hillary had a power base that included 'the full weight of the Clinton machine, the Democratic Party, and the White House.'
'Bill said he could tell that Loretta knew from the get-go that she'd made a huge mistake,' the adviser said.
'She was literally trembling, shaking with nervousness. Her husband tried to comfort her; he kept patting her hand and rubbing her back.'
Ultimately, Klein reports, Lynch told the former president that there was no chance of his wife being indicted or prosecuted for exposing state secrets to hackers and foreign adversaries.
She made the same pledge to President Barack Obama and his key adviser Valerie Jarrett, even though the Department of Justice is nominally independent of the White House.
And the easy-going Comey, whom many observers pegged for a principled good egg, turned into a pragmatist driven by, according to Klein, 'huge ambition and an instinct for political survival.'
Not only would he risk his political future by recommending criminal charges against Hillary, but a not-guilty verdict would mark him as one of American history's greatest fools.
A week after the secret Clinton-Lynch meeting, Comey stood before cameras and laid out a forensic case why Hillary and her top aides were 'extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.'
Lynch, an old friend of hers told Klein, sat in her office seething. She had promised Bill there would be no black eye for his wife.
She cursed him. She covered her eyes rather than watch his workmanlike explanation of all of Hillary's misdeeds.
Then, in the blink of an eye, Comey turned 180 degrees.
Although the U.S. Espionage Act doesn't require harmful intent in order to charge someone – mere 'negligence' is enough – Comey insisted that this standard had only been used once before in history.
'Our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case,' he declared.
Klein concludes that 'Hillary was clearly guilty as sin, and the right thing would have been for Comey ... to make her pay for her sins. But he didn't.'
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