Matt Apuzzo reports for the NYT:
Update: Devlin Barrett has this article in the WSJ:
Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch plans to announce on Friday that she will accept whatever recommendation career prosecutors and the F.B.I. director make about whether to bring charges related to Hillary Clinton's personal email server, a Justice Department official said. Her decision removes the possibility that a political appointee will overrule investigators in the case.Of course, under the "unitary executive" structure of the federal government, all executive decisions are ultimately under the control of the President, but to squelch an indictment now Mr. Obama would have to do so personally, without Ms. Lynch as a buffer. The political consequences of doing so can be extraordinarily high, as President Nixon discovered after the Saturday Night Massacre.
The Justice Department had been moving toward such an arrangement for months -- officials said in April that it was being considered -- but a private meeting between Ms. Lynch and former President Bill Clinton this week set off a political furor and made the decision all but inevitable.
Update: Devlin Barrett has this article in the WSJ:
Ms. Lynch made the announcement during an appearance at the Aspen Ideas Festival in Colorado, in the face of growing criticism over her half-hour meeting with Mr. Clinton at the Phoenix airport.The possibility of disagreement between the FBI and others in the Justice Department is indeed a concern. There may not be a consensus, and she can't follow both of two conflicting recommendations.* * *Festival moderator [and WaPo columnist] Jonathan Capehart asked Ms. Lynch, "What on earth were you thinking?"
She said, "I think that's a perfectly reasonable question...Certainly my meeting with him raises questions and concerns. Believe me, I completely get that question."
Ms. Lynch said she had already planned to follow the recommendations of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and career prosecutors in resolving the case, but felt it was worth restating that publicly in order to try to reassure the public.* * *"I will be accepting their recommendations and their plan for going forward,'' she said, though she gave no indication of what she might do if there are disagreements among those individuals, or disagreements between the FBI and the Justice Department. In that sense, her remarks change little about the likely trajectory of the investigation. Officials have previously said they don't expect the case to result in criminal charges.
Political appointees at the Justice Department routinely say they follow the recommendations of career prosecutors. Still, Ms. Lynch's statement that she plans to follow the recommendation of FBI Director James Comey is significant because the bureau has at times sought criminal charges in cases where Justice Department officials didn't believe they were warranted.
Think career prosecutors (almost certainly Dems) in this case are going to prosecute? Not gonna happen.
Top Secret stuff on an unclassified server, and no one did nothing. With no prosecution, the nation's laws on the protection of classified information now are an instrument of tyranny because everyone being prosecuted under them from now on (assuming Clinton isn't prosecuted) is now prosecuted because they are not named Clinton.