Trump’s softening on Clinton riles GOP base

Conservative radio host Laura Ingraham tweeted: “Well, he’s not even president yet, but it looks like ‪@realDonaldTrump already pardoned a turkey for Thanksgiving.”

Trump told the New York Times during a meeting Tuesday that he wanted to move beyond the idea of attacking the Clintons, after saying nine days earlier, “I don’t want to hurt the Clintons.”

Conservative commentator Ann Coulter tweeted: “As happy as I am that our long national nightmare’s over, NO president shld be blocking investigators from doing their jobs.”

Tom Fitton, the president of the conservative legal group Judicial Watch, said, “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, D.C.”

Even Breitbart, the news site that supports Trump and whose former CEO Stephen Bannon is now Trump’s top adviser, used the banner headline “Broken Promise” on a story about Trump’s comments Tuesday.

And one of Trump’s GOP opponents, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., warned that it might be a mistake to drop the matter.

“Well so much for ‘Locking Her Up’ I guess,” he said. “The bottom line is that I think the Clinton Foundation, the whole mess, should be looked at with an independent view, not a political agenda. I never believed Obama’s Justice Department would seriously look at what she may have done.”

“I can understand wanting to put the election behind us and heal the nation, but I do hope all the things President-elect Trump said about how crooked she was – well, we just don’t let it go without some serious effort to see if the law was truly violated,” he added. “I think that would be a mistake.”

But former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani is backing Trump’s decision to drop the matter.

“Look, there’s a tradition in American politics that after you win an election, you sort of put things behind you,” Giuliani told reporters in Trump’s press pool. “And if that’s the decision he reached, that’s perfectly consistent with sort of a historical pattern of things come up, you say a lot of things, even some bad things might happen, and then you can sort of put it behind you in order to unite the nation.

“So if he made that decision, I would be supportive of it. I’d also be supportive of continuing the investigation.”

On the issue of Trump’s flip-flop, retiring Democratic Rep. Steve Israel of New York told CNN on Tuesday: “I think we’re going to be looking at a bipolar presidency.”

During the campaign, Trump repeatedly argued Clinton should be jailed over her email server. At campaign rallies, the crowd often broke into chants of, “Lock her up!”