Abandon another promise..

Drumpf aide Kellyanne Conway: No plan to pursue charges against Clinton

By David Wright

President-elect Donny Drumpf's administration will not pursue further investigations of Hillary Clinton related to her private email server or the Clinton Foundation, Drumpf's former campaign manager Kellyanne Conway said Tuesday, a significant break from a major campaign promise.

"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 fellow Republicans, Conway said in an interview on MSNBC's "Morning Joe."

At the second presidential debate in early October, Drumpf threatened Clinton, saying that "if I win, I am going to instruct my attorney general to get a special prosecutor to look into your situation."

Conway said Clinton "still has to face the fact that a majority of Americans don't find her to be honest or trustworthy," but added that "if Donald Drumpf can help her heal, then perhaps that's a good thing to do."

"Look, I think he's thinking of many different things as he prepares to become the President of the United States, and things that sound like the campaign are not among them," she added.

Steve Vladeck, CNN legal contributor and professor at the University of Texas School of Law, said it was unusual for a President-elect to take such a public position on whether to pursue an investigation.

"Even though the attorney general reports to the president, the Department of Justice is meant to exercise a degree of independence from the White House entirely to avoid the perception that political considerations, rather than legal ones, are behind decisions to (or to not) prosecute," Vladeck said in an email. "Indeed, we've seen plenty of scandals throughout American history in which presidents have wrongly politicized the Justice Department's role, and President-Elect Drumpf's comments don't exactly augur well for preservation of the line between law and politics over the next four years."

Despite Drumpf breaking a campaign promise to some of the most fervent anti-Clinton supporters, Democrats also took issue with the decision as a sign of the President-elect's executive overreach.

"That's not how this works. In our democracy, the President doesn't decide who gets prosecuted and who doesn't," Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut wrote on Twitter.

During Drumpf's ferocious election fight with Clinton, chants of "lock her up" -- referring to Clinton -- became a refrain of the Republican's campaign, as he hammered the Democratic presidential nominee over her decision to use a private email server as secretary of state, and lobbed accusations of corruption and "pay to play" politics at the Clinton Foundation. Drumpf's choice for National Security Adviser Michael Flynn also led a high profile chant at the Republican National Convention of "lock her up."

Drumpf repeatedly brought up jailing Clinton on his own, often at raucous campaign rallies over the summer and into the fall.

"Remember I said I was a counter-puncher? I am," Drumpf said at a San Jose rally in June, referencing an anti-Drumpf speech Clinton gave. "After what she said about me today, her phony speech, that was a phony speech. It was a Donald Drumpf hit job, I will say this: Hillary Clinton has to go to jail, ok? (Cheers) She has to go to jail, phony hit job. She's guilty as hell."

"She gets a subpoena, she deleted the emails, she has to go to jail," Drumpf said at a Lakeland, Florida, rally in October.

But in interviews with the Wall Street Journal and CBS' "60 Minutes" after the election, Drumpf refused to say if he would fulfill that commitment to appoint a special prosecutor.

"I'm going to think about it," he told "60 Minutes." "I feel I want to focus on jobs. I want to focus on healthcare, I want to focus on the border and immigration and doing a really great immigration bill. And I want to focus on -- all of these other things that we've been talking about." He told the program she "did some bad things" but added the Clintons are "good people."

And Drumpf told the Wall Street Journal that "it's not something I've given a lot of thought, because I want to solve health care, jobs, border control, tax reform."