Top House Dem calls Clinton, Lynch meeting "regrettable"
As both former President Bill Clinton and Attorney General Loretta Lynch deal with the fallout from their tarmac meeting last week, Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff said it's "regrettable" that the pair opted to meet face-to-face while Clinton's wife is under investigation by the FBI.
"Look, I think both of them wish their airplanes had never come anywhere near each other," Schiff, a member of the House Intelligence Committee and the Benghazi Committee, said on CBS' "Face the Nation." "I think they've both acknowledged that they would prefer if they'd never gotten together."
Schiff said he believes Clinton and Lynch when they say it was a "chance encounter" and that they didn't discuss the investigation at all, and that he trusts Lynch to take the FBI's recommendations in the case of Hillary Clinton's private email server.
"This was a regrettable instance where they got together quite coincidentally, but at the same time the attorney general has said she's going to let the career prosecutors and the FBI make the decision about how to handle the case," he said. "I have ... every confidence that they will make a completely apolitical decision and do what's in the public interest here."
As for security concerns presented by Clinton's decision to use a private server, versus the State Department's server, Schiff said it wouldn't be a "surprise" if there had been one or more attempts to hack it.
"There's obviously great interest in the secretary and Donald Trump in terms of foreign powers as well as criminal hackers," Schiff sad. "So yes, you'd have to expect that it would be of great interest, you'd have to expect prudently that people would try to get in."
Schiff also addressed the recent terror attacks in Istanbul and Dhaka, Bangladesh, saying
"We're dealing with a vicious and adaptive enemy and their attacks are all very strategic," he said, noting that ISIS was clearly trying to send a different message in each case.
As a result, there is "unfortunately more reason for concern" for Americans traveling abroad, Schiff added: despite losing ground in Syria and Iraq, ISIS is "still virulent" and looking to expand its influence elsewhere in the world.