Former FBI Director James Comey has said that he tried to distance the FBI from the Justice Department over Hillary Clinton’s email probe due to a number of factors including then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch’s controversial meeting with former President Bill Clinton on an airport tarmac.

Former FBI Director James Comey has said that he tried to distance the FBI from the Justice Department over Hillary Clinton’s email probe due to a number of factors including then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch’s controversial meeting with former President Bill Clinton on an airport tarmac, notes Fox News.
Comey made the admission during his Senate intelligence hearing Thursday after the committee chairman, Senator Richard Burr, asked him about his decision to publicly announce the Bureau’s findings on the email case. 
Burr asked, “Was your decision influenced by the attorney general’s tarmac meeting with the former president, Bill Clinton?” 
Comey answered, “Yes, in an ultimately conclusive way, that was the thing that capped it for me that I had to do something separately to protect the credibility of the investigation which meant both the FBI and the Justice Department.” 
In fact, the former FBI head had made similar comments during a separate Senate judiciary hearing last month; when he was asked about the investigation into Mrs. Clinton, Comey said, “I'm not picking on the attorney general, Loretta Lynch, who I like very much -- but her meeting with President Clinton on that airplane was the capper for me, and I then said, you know what, the department cannot, by itself, credibly end this.” 
CBS News reports that the private meeting between Lynch and Mr. Clinton occurred last June in Phoenix; though the timing had been characterized as coincidental and the conversation was said to be strictly personal in nature, critics pointed out that it was inappropriate since Mrs. Clinton was in the process of being scrutinized over her emails.
In the more recent intelligence hearing on Thursday, Comey added that another reason he decided to break from the Justice Department was because, as he told lawmakers, “the Attorney General directed me not to call it an investigation and call it a matter—which confused me.” 
According to the Washington Post, he later explained, “I don’t know whether it was intentional or not, but it gave the impression that the attorney general was trying to align how we describe our work [with how the Clinton campaign was talking about it].” 
He reportedly said such efforts gave him “a queasy feeling.”