Politics

Loretta Lynch Responds To Comey Criticism About Clinton Email Probe

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Former Attorney General Loretta Lynch released a statement on Sunday defending her instructions to then-FBI Director James Comey to refer to the Hillary Clinton email probe as a “matter” instead of an “investigation.”

In his soon-to-be released book, “A Higher Loyalty,” the former FBI director described Lynch’s request as an effort to get him to “align with the Clinton campaign strategy.”

“It occurred to me in the moment that this issue of semantics was strikingly similar to the fight the Clinton campaign had waged against The New York Times in July,” Comey writes in his book, according to the Washington Examiner. “Ever since then, the Clinton team had been employing a variety of euphemisms to avoid using the word ‘investigation.'”

“The attorney general seemed to be directing me to align with the Clinton campaign strategy,” he continued. “Her ‘just do it’ response to my question indicated that she had no legal or procedural justification for her request, at least not one grounded in our practices or traditions. Otherwise, I assume, she would have said so.”

But in her statement, Lynch insists she “followed the department’s long-standing policy of neither confirming nor denying the fact of an investigation.” A policy that, according to Lynch, neither “misleads nor misinforms.”

“Any suggestion that I invoked this bedrock policy for any other reason is simply false,” the statement said.

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