# Loretta Lynch **Loretta Lynch** (born May 21, 1959) was [[Barack Obama]]'s Attorney General (2015–2017) and the first African-American woman in the post. On the right she is remembered almost entirely for a half-hour on an airport tarmac in Phoenix. ## Career Lynch was twice U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York (1999–2001 and 2010–2015). The Senate confirmed her as Attorney General on April 23, 2015, 56–43; she served from April 27, 2015 to January 20, 2017. ## The tarmac meeting On June 27, 2016 — while the FBI's investigation of [[Hillary Clinton]]'s email server was still open — [[Bill Clinton]] boarded Lynch's government plane in Phoenix. Local ABC15 reporter Christopher Sign broke the story two days later. Lynch said they discussed grandchildren, travel and golf. On July 1 she said she would "fully accept" the FBI's recommendations and "certainly wouldn't do it again." Documents later released through FOIA suits by [[Judicial Watch]] and the [[American Center for Law and Justice]] showed DOJ prepared talking points before her press conference; key portions stayed redacted *[single-sourced]*. [[James Comey]] testified in June 2017 that Lynch had told him to call the Clinton probe a "matter" rather than an "investigation," and cited the tarmac episode among his reasons for announcing the case's outcome himself. The DOJ Inspector General in June 2018 called the meeting an error in judgment because of the appearance it created, while finding no evidence of political bias. **Current status:** partner at Paul, Weiss since 2019, where she chairs its civil-rights and racial-equity audit practice. ## RWKB angle The tarmac meeting is the founding text of the "two-tiered justice" narrative — the shorthand for the claim that the Clinton email case was rigged, reused ever since to discredit investigations of Trump. ## See Also - [[James Comey]] - [[Crossfire Hurricane]]