Attorney General Loretta Lynch will not recuse herself from Hillary Clinton's email case, nor will she say it was a mistake to meet with Bill Clinton privately, Bloomberg Politics editor Mark Halperin said Friday morning, quoting a "senior Justice Department official" he chatted with on his cell phone while he was still on the air as part of
MSNBC's "Morning Joe" program.
"This is a senior Justice Department official who is playing down that this is anything new," Halperin told show hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski. "Says this was the attorney general's intention all along to let the career people decide.
"Quote, 'She is not recusing herself. She is not stepping aside and does not expect that the attorney general today will say it was a mistake to meet with Bill Clinton for 20 or 30 minutes privately.'"
Critics on both sides of the fence have called for Lynch to remove herself from the case after the former president walked across the Phoenix airport and boarded her government plane and remained for a half-hour.
Halperin's source was playing down a report in Friday's edition of
The New York Times that stated Lynch would announce on Friday that she is accepting the recommendations of career prosecutors and FBI Director James Comey on whether to pursue charges against Clinton for her use of a private email server while she was secretary of state.
Lynch will not recuse herself from the case, as many critics have demanded, and will remain formally in charge of the investigation, The Times notes.
But the decision means that there is no possibility of a political appointee overruling the case's investigators. Lynch's move is something that has been under discussion since April, but the controversy over her meeting with Clinton forced her hand on the announcement.
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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