It’s a safe bet former President Bill Clinton and Attorney General Loretta Lynch weren’t discussing grandchildren or golf, as both later contended, when they met privately June 27 at the Phoenix airport.

So what did they discuss?

Comments last week by the senior justice on the Supreme Court might give a clue — and a candid suggestion of how severely Clinton breached protocol by making contact with the nation’s top prosecutor — while his wife, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, was under investigation in a private e-mail server scandal.

Mere days after that encounter, the FBI announced it was recommending no charges be filed against Hillary Clinton even though she mishandled classified documents and lied about it.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, 83, in an interview Thursday, said she doesn’t want to think about the possibility of Donald Trump winning the White House, and she predicts the next president — “whoever she will be” — will have a few appointments to make to the Supreme Court.

Ginsburg’s intentions are clear: She wants to retire soon. She wants a Hillary Clinton administration to appoint her successor — and a few other appointments to replace aging members of the Supreme Court.

That would be a safe assumption, since Ginsburg is widely regarded as the head of the court’s liberal wing.

Two justices, Anthony Kennedy and Stephen Breyer, are in their late 70s. Antonin Scalia died in February. The Republican Senate has resisted President Barack Obama’s attempt to seat Judge Merrick Garland as Scalia’s successor, saying that duty should fall to the next president.

Ginsburg’s remarks serve as a reminder of a large potential quid pro quo looming for Loretta Lynch.

It was Bill Clinton who launched Lynch’s career as a federal prosecutor, appointing her U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York in 1999, one of the most coveted prosecutorial jobs in the country, with oversight of Wall Street and cases involving some of the most influential and wealthy individuals in the country.

Lynch could only be grateful for such a huge opportunity.

It’s hard to believe the former president’s dismissal of the meeting as idle chit-chat, a social call. And even if it was just chit-chat, there’s nothing like a little face time with a former boss to remind one that he gave you that first big break; and if you play along you might keep your Cabinet post in the next administration or, better yet, maybe land a seat on the nation’s highest court.

Clinton and Lynch are both highly intelligent and perceptive people. A simple message like this could have been communicated without either of them uttering a single word about the subject.