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Clintons are Still Drama Junkies

By Clarence Page, Tribune Content Agency on

I like Bill and Hillary Clinton, but they don't make it easy.

For more than a quarter century I have watched them slip and out of scandals, most of which were either generated or exaggerated by their Republican rivals.

We've all learned to expect scandals by now. What irritates me is to see the Clintons slip and slide into a scandal that could have been avoided and can't honestly be blamed on anyone other than themselves.

The latest example is tarmac-gate, so named because it occurred on one of former president Bill Clinton's favorite places to schmooze with VIPs: an airport tarmac amid the VIPs' private planes.

Clinton was preparing to fly out of Phoenix during a seven-state fund-raising swing for his wife's campaign when he learned that Attorney General Loretta Lynch was in another nearby plane, according to reports.

He decided to say hi. Clinton has known Lynch since at least 1999 when he named her to serve as U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York. With Phoenix boiling at 103 degrees, he climbed aboard her air-conditioned plane.

 

The chat lasted 20 minutes and also included Lynch's husband, Secret Service agents and several staff members.

Fine. But Lynch is still the nation's top cop. She oversees the FBI, which has been investigating whether Bill Clinton's wife or any of her associates broke laws in using an unauthorized private email server for her when she was secretary of state.

Now that the FBI has decided against filing criminal charges against Hillary Clinton, her husband's visit with Lynch taints that decision with a cloud of suspicion. Republicans howl about the appearance of impropriety. Populists charge that the system is rigged. Democrats ask how the former president and current attorney general could have been so stupid.

Washington Post editorial writer Jonathan Capehart cleaned that up later by asking Lynch a question at the Aspen Ideas Festival in Colorado that virtually everybody wanted to ask: "What on earth were you thinking?"

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(c) 2016 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.

 

 

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