The Attorney General Isn’t Giving In To Fear

The attorney general isn’t giving in to fear.

- Marin Cogan

On January 4 before Obama announced he was forging ahead with gun-control measures despite opposition in Congress, before his tearful East Room speech and the town-hall meeting where he tried to convince the public that he was not trying to take away their guns the president welcomed a handful of reporters into the Oval Office. In the wake of the San Bernardino shootings, he told the reporters, he had asked his top law-enforcement official, Attorney General Loretta Lynch, along with her deputies and White House personnel, to submit recommendations about what he could do to fight gun violence via executive action. He had since received the report, he said, and was prepared to act on the recommendations.

Lynch, who was seated directly to his right, said nothing while the cameras clicked. In the brief clip that ran on networks, the cameras zoomed in on the president’s face, cutting her completely out of view. She appeared at the East Room event the next day, again off-camera. When the president conducted his live town hall later that week, she was absent. Staying out of the spotlight has been as much professional strategy as personality trait for Lynch, who may be the lowest-profile attorney general in recent memory. Over the course of a long career in the U.S. Attorney’s office in the Eastern District of New York, she managed to ascend to the top law-enforcement position in America without arousing much attention or creating controversy.