Gingrich: Trump shouldn't tell DOJ to ignore Clinton's potential wrongdoing

For President-elect Donald Trump to tell his government to ignore Hillary Clinton’s potential criminal wrongdoing, that “would be a tremendous blow to the rule of law,” former House Speaker Newt Gingrich warned Wednesday.

Trump reneged on his campaign pledge to have instruct his attorney general to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Clinton’s private email server as secretary of state, telling New York Times reporters Tuesday, “It’s just not something that I feel very strongly about.”


In an interview Wednesday morning with “Fox & Friends,” Gingrich said his reaction to Trump’s reversal “depends on exactly what he meant.”

“I think it would be as wrong for a president of the United States to say we’re not gonna enforce the law against somebody as it would be for the president of the United States to say I’m gonna direct the Justice Department or the IRS to go after somebody,” he said. “So I hope what President-elect Trump was saying is that he is not personally going to interfere or in any way suggest to the FBI and the IRS what they should be doing.”

Gingrich said he couldn’t imagine that Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, whom Trump nominated to serve as the nation’s attorney general, “would tolerate sending signals to the FBI or IRS that they should not look at law-breaking.”

“If laws are broken in a serious way, whether by Secretary Clinton or her staff or her husband, then the system has an obligation to enforce the law,” he continuing, though he cautioned that “the president should not follow up on a vendetta that’s political.”

“But he also does not have the authority to step in and say we’re gonna cover up all the crimes committed by the [Clinton] Foundation, we’re gonna cover up all the crimes committed by her staff, we’re gonna ignore the facts,” he added. “That would, in fact, be fully as much a violation of the rule of law as what Obama did.”

Gingrich urged Trump to be cautious in that realm, acknowledging that he can convey his personal views but stressing that he shouldn’t interfere with his FBI, IRS or Justice Department by instructing them not to “pay attention to law-breaking.”

“That would be a tremendous blow to the rule of law,” he said.

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