Did Loretta Lynch Illegally Meddle In 2016 Election?

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Did Obama White House And Loretta Lynch Illegally Meddle In 2016 Election?

Former Attorney General Loretta Lynch: Did she obstruct justice? (AP)

• 7:25 PM ET

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Scandal: The recent Comey hearings revealed a serious problem with White House corruption, perhaps going all the way to the top. But, no, we're not talking about Donald Trump. We're talking about Barack Obama, his attorney general and presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

Among the gems that tumbled out of former FBI Director James Comey's testimony last week is that Obama Attorney General Loretta Lynch pressured him last September to refer to the FBI investigation into Hillary Clinton's illegal homebrew email server as a "matter," not an "investigation." Not by coincidence, that was how the Clinton campaign itself was characterizing the investigation.

"At one point, (Lynch) directed me not to call it an 'investigation' but instead to call it a 'matter,' which confused me and concerned me," Comey recalled. "That was one of the bricks in the load that led me to conclude I have to step away from the department if we are to close this case credibly."

Why Lynch would direct Comey to obfuscate about the nature of the investigation is pretty clear: Lynch hoped to get Hillary Clinton elected so that she could stay on as the nation's top law officer. If Comey were talking up an "investigation" into a major party's candidate, it wouldn't look very good to the voters, would it?

Remember, Lynch had earlier in June consented to an impromptu face-to-face meeting with former President Bill Clinton in a jet on the Phoenix airport tarmac, right as the Justice Department was gearing up to look into Hillary's questionable email habits, which may have exposed both U.S. secrets and undercover agents to Chinese and Russian hackers.

Lynch's comments at the time about the substance of the meeting were laughably false, with her claiming that she and the former president only talked about personal family things, like golf and grandkids, not the growing scandals with Hillary Clinton's unsecured email server or the Clinton Foundation's questionable fund-raising activities.

Subsequently, in early July, an alarmed Comey told a press conference that he would not recommend that the Justice Department press charges against Clinton, despite calling Clinton and her aides "extremely careless."

Months later, in October, as the presidential campaign was hitting the home stretch, Comey told Congress that he had discovered new emails that might be relevant to the Clinton case. But then, mere days later, he called off the investigation.

To be blunt, this all stinks badly. At the very minimum, Comey's and Lynch's actions are highly questionable and go much further toward "collusion" and an "obstruction of justice" than anything President Trump has done.

Ironically, perhaps, with the original reason for the Senate Intelligence Committee's investigation — alleged Russian "collusion" with the Trump campaign — all but collapsed, the left and their allies in the media are now pursuing a different angle to get President Trump impeached: a charge of obstruction of justice.

Unfortunately, the fresh revelations from Comey about Lynch and the Clinton campaign won't go away. On Sunday, even California Democratic Sen. Diane Feinstein said that Lynch's actions gave her a "queasy feeling" and offered that there needed to be a "separate investigation" opened into her actions during the campaign. Feinstein even questioned whether Lynch was "giving cover to the Clinton campaign."

Likewise, "If the attorney general's office has become political, that is bad for us all," said Sen. Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican, as he too called for an investigation.

Meanwhile, President Bush's straight-shooter Attorney Gen. Michael Mukasey said that Lynch's actions had turned the Department of Justice into "an arm of the Clinton campaign."

"What makes it egregious is the fact ... that the attorney general of the United States was adjusting the way the department talked about its business so as to coincide with the way the Clinton campaign talked about that business," he said.

We agree that an investigation is warranted. We also agree that this is potentially far more serious than the charges that Trump campaign officials colluded with the Russians, for which there is still no evidence at all.

If Lynch did in fact turn the Justice Department into an "arm" of the Clinton campaign, it raises the inevitable larger and far more troubling question: Did President Obama know this? Did he approve of it? Was it his idea? Did anyone at the White House tell Lynch to soft-pedal the investigations? Was this all conducted in concert with the Clinton campaign? A yes answer to any of those would be devastating, for Obama, for Lynch and for Clinton.

If you're president, it's one thing to stump for your party's candidate, quite another to direct the branches of government to favor one candidate over another, and then to lie about it. For the record, that's a crime.