Tipsheet

The Reporter Who Broke the News About Clinton's Secret Tarmac Meeting is Dead

Katie Pavlich
Katie Pavlich  |  June 13, 2021 1:30 PM

Back in June 2016, local ABC15 reporter Christopher Sign broke the news that former President Bill Clinton secretly met with Attorney General Loretta Lynch on the tarmac at Sky Harbor Airport in Phoenix. The meeting lasted for nearly half-an-hour inside of Lynch's official government plane. 

At the time, then Democrat presidential candidate and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was under FBI investigation for sending and receiving top secret, classified information on a private email server. Just days after the meeting, the FBI announced Clinton would not face charges. 

"Although we did not find clear evidence that Secretary Clinton or her colleagues intended to violate laws governing the handling of classified information, there is evidence that they were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information," FBI Director James Comey said at the time. "Although there is evidence of potential violations of the statutes regarding the handling of classified information, our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case." 

"To be clear, this is not to suggest that in similar circumstances, a person who engaged in this activity would face no consequences. To the contrary, those individuals are often subject to security or administrative sanctions. But that is not what we are deciding now," Comey continued. 

Sign also wrote a book that was published in January 2020 called Secret on the Tarmac. 

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Four years later and Sign has died. He was working and living in Alabama. From the New York Post: 

The Alabama TV anchor who broke news of the infamous 2016 “tarmac meeting” between former President Clinton and then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch died Saturday in an apparent suicide, according to reports and his employer.

Christopher Sign, 45, was found dead by Hoover, Ala., police around 8:13 a.m. Saturday after cops received a call of “a person down” at his Scout Trace home, according to Al.com. The former college football player’s death is being investigated as a suicide, Hoover Lt. Keith Czeskleba said, according to the outlet.

“Chris was a tremendous leader in our newsroom,” wrote ABC 33/40, Sign’s outlet, in a Saturday tribute to the reporter.

Friends and colleagues are sending their condolences. Sign is survived by his wife and three children.