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Loretta Lynch will accept FBI's recommendations in Clinton email investigation

The move comes amid an uproar over Lynch's impromptu meeting this week with Bill Clinton while his wife is under federal investigation.
Photo by Jim Lo Scalzo

US Attorney General Loretta Lynch said she will accept the recommendations of prosecutors and investigators on whether or not to bring charges against Hillary Clinton over her email use.

"The recommendations will be reviewed by career supervisors in the Department of Justice and in the FBI, and by the FBI director, and then as is the common process, they present it to me and I fully expect to accept their recommendations," Lynch said in a televised interview with the Washington Post's Jonathan Capehart at the Aspen Ideas Festival.

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Lynch declined to give a timeline of when the investigation will be over and announced to the public, saying she doesn't "have the insight into the nuts and bolts of the findings."

News of the matter first broke Friday morning and was reported by the New York Times. Lynch said she had already come to the decision a while ago but wanted to keep it private since it was such a sensitive case.

The move comes amid an uproar over Lynch's impromptu meeting this week with Bill Clinton while his wife, the presumptive Democratic nominee for the White House, is under federal investigation.

The private meeting took place on Lynch's plane after she landed in Phoenix on Monday night and Bill Clinton was leaving the airport after a rally he held for his wife earlier that day.

Lynch, appointed by Democratic U.S. President Barack Obama, told reporters earlier this week that she did not discuss the email investigation or other pending matters before the Justice Department with Bill Clinton, calling their meeting aboard her plane "primarily social."

When asked at the Aspen Ideas Festival why she met with Bill Clinton in Phoenix, Lynch said it was a "perfectly reasonable question," and that she probably wouldn't do it again.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is probing Clinton's email use and whether laws were broken as a result of a personal server kept in her New York home while she was secretary of state, an issue that has come to overshadow her campaign.

Trump, on Thursday called Lynch's meeting "a sneak" and questioned the judgment of both Bill Clinton and the attorney general.

As Bernie Sanders said, Hillary Clinton has bad judgement. Bill's meeting was probably initiated and demanded by Hillary!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump)July 1, 2016

The Justice Department, along with the White House, has said the probe should be free of political interference.