The Justice Department's goal is to complete the investigation and make recommendations on whether charges should be filed before the two major party conventions take place toward the latter half of July, the source said.

Clinton ends the week with a firestorm brought on by Bill Clinton’s impromptu private meeting with U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch on an airport tarmac that opened her up to criticism from both Republicans and Democrats
The meeting has overshadowed good reviews from Clinton’s appearance earlier this week with Sen. Elizabeth Warren and the buzz her campaign wants to surround her July 5 rally in N.C. with President Obama

As for Trump, he seemingly missed a chance to rally conservatives when he stayed publicly silent for three days about the Supreme Court striking down Texas restrictions on abortion clinics, Bloomberg’s Sahil Kapur writes. Turmoil within the Trump campaign continued with the departures of two aides who handled surrogate operations quit, including one hired less than two weeks ago, New York Times reports.

While Vice President Joe Biden on Thursday recounted a conversation with Bernie Sanders in which he said the Vermont senator would endorse Hillary Clinton, Sanders himself declared later in the evening that he is "not there at this moment."

"Oh, I've talked to Bernie, Bernie's going to endorse her, this is going to work out," the vice president told NPR's Weekend Edition in an interview Thursday. "The Democrats are coalescing even before this occurs."

That conversation, Sanders told MSNBC's Chris Hayes, happened "I think it was three weeks ago."

"Look, on that issue, we are trying to work with Secretary Clinton's campaign on areas that we can agree on, where the people who supported me, we got about 12, 13 million votes, and what they want to see, whether it is on … moving toward making public colleges and universities tuition-free, or moving aggressively in terms of health care and moving toward a universal health care system, significantly expanding primary health care, those are the issues that we're working with Secretary Clinton on now and I hope we can be successful," Sanders explained.

Sanders reiterated that he will "do everything that I can to defeat Donald Trump" for "a variety of reasons."

"Number one, he's a pathological liar. That's not a good quality to have in a president," Sanders said. "Number two, he wants to give hundreds of billions of dollars in tax breaks to the top two-tenths of one percent by repealing the estate tax. He thinks that climate change is a hoax. And most importantly, we cannot have a president who goes around insulting Mexicans, Latinos, Muslims, women and African-Americans. That's outrageous. So I'm going to do everything that I can to see that Donald Trump is defeated."

Asked whether doing "everything I can" would entail going to rallies and campaigning for Clinton like Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Sanders responded that his focus is on shaping the platform ahead of the full committee meeting next weekend in Orlando, Florida.

"We are working, as we speak, we are working with the Clinton campaign, trying to be able to come forward and say to my supporters out there, you know what, here's the progress that we have made," he said. "So I hope we can reach that goal. We are not there at this moment."

Attorney General Loretta Lynch is expected to announce Friday that she will accept the recommendations of the FBI in its investigation into Hillary Clinton's State Department emails, effectively removing herself as the final arbiter of the investigation. The move, first reported by the New York Times, comes just days after a much criticized meeting Lynch had with former President Bill Clinton on an airport tarmac in Arizona.

For Lynch to publicly comment on an ongoing investigation is highly unusual and Lynch is not expected to recuse herself from involvement in discussions and the case. The FBI is investigating the private server Hillary Clinton used while Secretary of State and whether Clinton or her aides broke any laws in their handling of classified information.

Lynch and Bill Clinton met in Arizona Monday when they discovered they were both at the airport. The attorney general insisted their discussion was "social" in nature and that they did not talk about the emails or any other official matters.

Justice Department lawyers notified U.S. District Court Judge Rudolph Contreras on Wednesday that State will be unable to meet the court-ordered deadline of July 21 in the lawsuit the conservative group Citizens United brought earlier this year seeking emails ex-State Department officials Cheryl Mills, Huma Abedin, Melanne Verveer and Michael Fuchs exchanged with individuals at the Clinton Foundation or a firm with ties to the Clintons, Teneo Consulting.

The government lawyers asked Contreras to give State an additional 27 months— until October 2018—to finish work on the request, processing documents at a rate of about 500 pages a month.