WASHINGTON — As the Republican strategist Brian Walsh watched the nonstop cable news coverage Tuesday from his K Street office, he thought he was seeing the stuff of his party’s dreams.

A week after former President Bill Clinton lit a political firestorm by strolling onto Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch’s plane for a private conversation, the director of the F.B.I. announced that the bureau would not recommend criminal charges over Hillary Clinton’s handling of classified information. And then, just three hours later, President Obama and Mrs. Clinton emerged arm in arm from Air Force One in North Carolina for their first joint campaign rally.

But this politically pregnant convergence of events was not met with a battalion of well-credentialed Republican law enforcement and national security officials flooding the television airwaves to raise questions about the inquiry and hammer Mrs. Clinton. Nor was there any made-for-social-media video contrasting what the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, called Mrs. Clinton’s “extremely careless” handling of 110 classified emails with the former secretary of state’s shifting explanations over the last year about her use of a private email server.

There were not even any talking points sent to leading Republican members of Congress offering guidance on the best lines of attack against Mrs. Clinton in the aftermath of what was a remarkably harsh assessment of her conduct.