“The tarmac summit sent a signal. It is a signal to all of the hardworking FBI agents who have the goods on Hillary. The attorney general has made it clear what team she is on. The attorney general isn’t on the side of justice. She’s on the Democratic Party team.” —J. Christian Adams, former DOJ Voting Rights Section attorney

Were it not for the fact that local reporter Christopher Sign from Phoenix’s ABC15 Arizona received a news tip and led a crew on the tarmac at Phoenix International Airport last Monday, the nation might never have known that Attorney General Loretta Lynch had a private 30-minute meeting with Bill Clinton, despite the reality Hillary Clinton remains under FBI investigation (and was interviewed over the holiday weekend). Moreover, Sign noted the FBI was “instructing everybody around ‘no photos, no pictures, no cell phones.’”

It was so clandestine, Hillary even stole one of Barack Obama’s favorite lines: “I learned about it in the news.”

A day after the meeting was uncovered, Lynch insisted it was innocuous — “[There was no discussion on any matter pending before the Department or any matter pending with any other body. There was no discussion of Benghazi, no discussion of State Department emails…”

There didn’t have to be. The meeting itself was the message. And it is clear that Lynch is every bit the arrogant and compromised law enforcement official her predecessor Eric Holder was. The very same Eric Holder who, when the FBI sought felony charges against former CIA Director David Petraeus for mishandling classified material and then lying about it, had those charges reduced to a misdemeanor.

Thus despite criticism from both sides of the aisle, Lynch refused to recuse herself. Instead, she promised, “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.” Apparently Lynch believes her pinky swear will sufficiently defuse this egregious conflict of interest.

Yet Adams astutely picked up another “tell” as poker players put it, noting that Lynch “borrowed the narrative of the Hillary campaign when she described the FBI criminal investigation as a ‘security inquiry.’” Adams explained that it’s “a very bad sign that the person who must approve any grand-jury referral has adopted Hillary’s dishonest language.”

Yet it gets even worse. FBI agents reportedly are not only “livid” about the appearance of the Lynch-Clinton meeting, they are furious because Bill Clinton is a potential witness in a separate FBI investigation of the Clinton Foundation. An investigation where the Lynch-run DOJ filed a motion in federal court last Wednesday on behalf of the State Department, asking for a 27-month delay in producing some key emails between Hillary’s top aides and both the Foundation and a public relations firm Bill launched.

In other words, if Clinton wins the election, the public won’t know about any potential corruption until after she has been president for nearly two years.

Why the delay? The State Department discovered their estimate of 6,000 emails and other document exchanges between Clinton and her quartet of aides — Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Michael Fuchs, Ambassador-At-Large Melanne Verveer, Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills, and Deputy Chief of Staff Huma Abedin — had grown to “34,116 potentially responsive documents,” as in an average of 700 communications per month between the Clinton Foundation and Teneo Holdings. The same Teneo Holdings where Bill Clinton was formerly a client and a paid consultant, and where Abedin simultaneously served as employee while working for Hillary at the State Department. Mills was also a “double-dipper,” employed by the Clinton Foundation and the Clinton Global Initiative, while serving at State.

And that’s when the State Department was keeping track at all. Following a successful FOIA suit in federal court, the Associated Press reviewed Hillary’s official calendar during her tenure as secretary of state. The AP identified at least 75 meetings she had with “longtime political donors, Clinton Foundation contributors and corporate and other outside interests” that were scrubbed. AP also confirmed that Clinton failed to turn over at least one work-related 2010 email between her and Abedin indicating she set up her private server to avoid accessibility. And on Monday it was revealed Abedin told Judicial Watch attorneys that Clinton destroyed her secretary of state schedules — as in federal records required to be preserved — “on more than one occasion.”

Anyone still remember Clinton deleted a whopping 33,000 “personal” emails based solely on her own discretion?

“I certainly wouldn’t do it again,” an ostensibly repentant Lynch said Friday, further insisting the “most important thing for me as attorney general is the integrity of this Department of Justice. And the fact that the meeting I had is now casting a shadow over how people will view that work is something that I take seriously and deeply and painfully.”

Not seriously and deeply and painfully enough to recuse herself. And the fact that she wouldn’t meet with Bill Clinton again is specious nonsense. One meeting was more than enough.

Will the FBI be able to maintain its integrity? Director James Comey insists it will, but integrity is often measured against worries of career destruction. Moreover, one is left to wonder why the agency scheduled a meeting with the former secretary over the holiday weekend, while millions of Americans were distracted with celebrating Independence Day.

Clinton was grilled for three and a half hours. Campaign spokesman Nick Merrill insisted she was “pleased to have had the opportunity to assist the Department of Justice in bringing this review to a conclusion.”

“Security inquiry” is now “review,” and a corrupt Leftmedia is already reporting no charges will be filed.

“This is a marriage of a Clinton-style carnival ride in an age of Obama-style lawlessness,” Adams writes. “The stars of ‘no controlling legal authority’ are behaving badly in an age of ‘punishing your enemies and rewarding your friends.’”

Friends indeed. “While Lynch offers no explanation as to why in the world she agreed to the 30-minute meeting on a plane in Phoenix, perhaps she felt she owed the former president something,” writes New York Post columnist Michael Goodwin. “Remember, he first nominated her to be the US attorney in Brooklyn in 1999, a promotion that changed her life.”

Regardless, Lynch didn’t owe Clinton her integrity, or an already-tainted DOJ an even tawdrier reputation. In a better nation, she would resign. In one run by the most corrupt administration in history, it’s not going to happen.

> Update: FBI Director James Comey announced that there is “no evidence” Clinton intentionally deleted any work-related emails, adding that there was “no intentional misconduct.” Though he said “there is evidence that they were extremely careless,” he went on to effectively exonerate the former secretary of state: “Although the Department of Justice makes final decisions on matters like this, we are expressing to Justice our view that no charges are appropriate in this case.”

> It would certainly appear the fix was in from the beginning, just as most every American suspected. Clinton broke the law and endangered national security. Yet she will waltz to the Democrat nomination and, we fear, the White House.