Trump: Let Clinton email issue go
President-elect shifts from lock her up to leave her alone
During Donald Trump’s successful White House campaign, his massive crowds chanted, “Lock her up. Lock her up.”
What he didn’t say was that, as president, he would not have the authority to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Hillary Clinton, much less jail her, as Trump threatened during a debate. That’s the jurisdiction of the U.S. Justice Department, which is supposed to work outside the influence of politics.
Now that he’s won the election, the president-elect appears to be sending a signal to Congress and perhaps even his incoming attorney general that it’s no longer politically beneficial to try to prosecute the former Democratic presidential nominee.
Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway told MSNBC that the president-elect hopes Congress will forgo further investigations of Clinton. “I think when the president-elect, who’s also the head of your party, tells you before he’s even inaugurated that he doesn’t wish to pursue these charges, it sends a very strong message, tone and content to the members” of Congress, Conway told MSNBC’s Morning Joe.
“He was brilliant in neutralizing the harsh negative attitudes towards himself by making Hillary Clinton equally distasteful,” said Larry Jacobs, a presidential historian at the University of Minnesota. “Now he’s shedding it once in office because it would hurt him.”
The belief among Trump’s supporters that Clinton was a crimi-
nal who would end up in jail was a powerful message in a campaign defined by harsh personal attacks more than policy differences. Republican strategists said Trump was never serious about putting his political opponent behind bars. “To Donald Trump, it was more a chant to get her out of government,” said Brad Blakeman, a former senior staff member to President George W. Bush. Indeed, legal experts had warned that, only under authoritarian regimes, can leaders unilaterally jail political dissidents and opponents, and especially not under the United States’ carefully constructed democratic system of checks and balances and separation of powers.
Trump may risk angering some of his most enthusiastic backers, many of whom angrily taunted Clinton’s motorcade with signs reading “Lock her up” in campaign stops across the country. Judicial Watch, a group that’s pursued many investigations and lawsuits against the Clintons, responded with dismay to the news. “If Mr. Trump’s appointees continue the Obama administration’s politicized spiking of a criminal investigation of Hillary Clinton, it would be a betrayal of his promise to the American people to ‘drain the swamp’ of out-of-control corruption in Washington,” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said in a statement.
The investigation of Clinton’s private email server was an outgrowth of a special House committee to investigate the terror attacks in 2012 in Benghazi, Libya. House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy credited the inquiry with driving down Clinton’s poll ratings. The strategy became increasingly effective as Republicans built up expectations that Clinton would be indicted by the FBI. Director James Comey, a Republican, determined that “no reasonable prosecutor” would press criminal charges based on the evidence. While Clinton enjoyed a sizable lead in head-tohead polls, Republicans cried foul, and Trump ramped up his complaints of a “rigged system.”
“The investigation itself came out of a political atmosphere,” said Julian Zelizer, a presidential expert at Princeton University. “It was just trumped up during the campaign itself. Obviously, some of his supporters might be angry because they believed that chant. If he moves on to other issues, they will as well.”
During the campaign, Trump threatened Clinton repeatedly with further investigation of her use of a private e-mail server as well as the fundraising practices of the Clinton Foundation. During one of their debates, Trump told her, “If I win, I am going to instruct my attorney general to get a special prosecutor to look into your situation further.”
After the election, Trump signaled he would not pursue Clinton or her husband, former president Bill Clinton.
“I don’t want to hurt them,” Trump said this month on CBS’
60 Minutes. “They’re good people. I don’t want to hurt them.”
Conway told MSNBC that Clinton “still has to face the fact that a majority of Americans don’t find her to be honest or trustworthy,” and “if Donald Trump can help her heal, then perhaps that’s a good thing to do.”
Jacobs said calling off congressional investigators is “the right thing to do” for Trump. “Donald Trump doesn’t want to enter office with the lowest approval rating of any president in history, and he’s got to find a way to get out from underneath the acrimony of the campaign and at least get a little honeymoon,” he said.
“He was brilliant in neutralizing the harsh negative attitudes towards himself by making Hillary Clinton equally distasteful. Now he’s shedding it once in office.” Larry Jacobs, University of Minnesota