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Did Christopher Sign get death threats after Clinton tarmac story? Friends can't believe 'suicide' suggestion

Christopher Sign's friends don't believe he killed himself and there are many on Twitter who are reminded of the Clinton story he broke

ABC reporter and news anchor Christopher Sign died on Saturday, June 12 at age 45.  As per news reports, at 8.13 am on Saturday, the 911 center in Hoover, Alabama received a call of a person down at a residence on Scout Trace. Hoover police and fire personnel arrived to find Sign dead. Hoover Police's Lt Keith Czeskleba said the death is being investigated as a suicide.

But the suicide theory is not something everyone believes, especially his friends. Jamie Hale, a sports anchor in Birmingham at ABC 33/40 News, took to Twitter and wrote, “I can’t believe we have an article with this title. It doesn’t feel real. We were in the office together last night cutting up like we always do. I don’t understand why. I can’t talk about you in the past tense. The grief today is unbearable.” A person called Steve Crenshaw wrote on Twitter, “I can’t process this information. I’ve known Chris for 30 years and this doesn’t seem right.”

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In fact, there were conspiracy theories as well. “No way this guy Christopher Sign, who was a successful author, who wrote about the Clinton tarmac meeting just up and committed suicide. I’m not a conspiracy person but this is weird. Too weird,” said a Twitter user. 

One of the bigger stories Sign broke during his time was the secret Sky Harbor tarmac meeting between former President Bill Clinton and former US Attorney General Loretta Lynch.

The 2016 meeting between Lynch and Clinton welled into a political storm, with Republicans asserting that it compromised the Justice Department’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails during her tenure as secretary of state. Lynch had then said the meeting with Clinton was unplanned, largely social, and did not touch on the email investigation. She claimed that he had walked uninvited from his plane to her government plane, which were both parked on a tarmac at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport.

“He did come over and say hello, and speak to my husband and myself, and talk about his grandchildren and his travels and things like that,” Lynch had said at a news conference in Los Angeles at the time. “That was the extent of that. And no discussions were held into any cases or things like that.”

Sign did speak about death threats he had received as a result of breaking the story. Sign, who was a morning anchor at the Phoenix-area ABC15 when he first reported the encounter, had also said there was more to the story and even wrote a book about it, ‘Secret on the Tarmac’.

The book, he claimed, "details everything that they don't want you to know and everything they think you forgot. But Bill Clinton was on that plane for 20 minutes, and it wasn't just about golf, grandkids, and Brexit. There's so much that doesn't add up."

Sign told Fox News in early 2020 his family received numerous death threats since he broke the story about the meeting in the lead up to the 2016 election. "My family received significant death threats shortly after breaking this story," Sign said at the time. "Credit cards hacked. You know, my children, we have code words. We have secret code words that they know what to do."

Sign is survived by his wife Laura and their three sons.