Trump says he's not interested in pursuing case against Clinton 'It’s just not something that I feel very strongly about,' Trump told The New York Times.

President-elect Donald Trump conceded Tuesday that he probably won’t make good on his campaign pledge to pursue a new criminal investigation into his political rival, Hillary Clinton.

“It’s just not something that I feel very strongly about,” he said Tuesday afternoon in an on-the-record discussion with reporters from The New York Times.


Trump cast his reversal as a unifying move that, contrary to some of the early backlash, he believes won’t upset his supporters.

“I don't think they will be disappointed. I think I will explain it that we in many ways will save our country,” he said, adding that prosecuting Clinton “would be very, very divisive for the country.”

Trump did, however, suggest he wasn’t taking potential investigations into Clinton off the table, while still remarking that he doesn’t want to “hurt the Clintons.”

“I'm not looking to go back and go through this,” he added.

Earlier on Tuesday, Trump's senior adviser Kellyanne Conway had indicated that the president-elect was likely to renege on his promise to jail Clinton, a sharp departure from the “lock her up!” chants that Trump encouraged at his campaign rallies, immediately drawing the ire of some conservatives.

Breitbart News, the alt-right news organization formerly run by Steve Bannon, Trump's chief strategist, headlined the lead story on its home page “BROKEN PROMISE.”

And Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog agency that sued to get more of Clinton’s State Department emails released, urged Trump on Tuesday to “commit his administration” to investigating Clinton, while promising to continue its own litigation and investigations to help uncover possible scandals.

For Trump to refuse to do so “would be a betrayal of his promise to the American people to ‘drain the swamp’ of out-of-control corruption in Washington, DC,” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton warned in a statement. “President-elect Trump should focus on healing the broken justice system, affirm the rule of law and appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the Clinton scandals.”

Conway, the senior adviser who successfully managed the final iteration of Trump’s campaign, said Tuesday morning the president-elect will not push for further criminal investigations into potential wrongdoing by Clinton, suggesting he has chosen to “help her heal” from the bruising defeat her campaign never saw coming.

It traditionally would not be seen as the proper role of the president to direct any Justice Department investigations because a firewall has historically been respected between the DOJ and the White House. However, Trump said during the campaign that if elected, he would ask his attorney general to appoint a special prosecutor to go after Clinton for her use of a private server during her tenure as secretary of state.

“I think when the president-elect, who’s also the head of your party now, tells you before he’s even inaugurated he doesn’t wish to pursue these charges, it sends a very strong message, tone and content, to the members,” Conway said. “And I think Hillary Clinton still has to face the fact that a majority of Americans don’t find her to be honest or trustworthy, but if Donald Trump can help her heal, then perhaps that's a good thing.”

MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” reported Tuesday morning, citing an anonymous source “with direct knowledge of Donald Trump’s thinking,” that Trump will not pursue criminal investigations against Clinton over her use of the private server or into her family’s charitable foundation.

Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, a Trump ally under consideration for a Cabinet position, was among the contingent of supporters who had said Clinton belonged in jail. But on Tuesday, he backed off after Conway's statement.

“Look, there’s a tradition in American politics that after you win an election, you sort of put things behind you,” he told reporters inside Trump Tower. “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.”

Either way, Giuliani continued, he would support Trump’s “tough choice.” “You could go either way. If he made the choice to unite the nation, I think, all those people who didn’t vote against him, maybe, could take another look at him,” he said.

Trump last week nominated Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions to serve as his attorney general. In an interview late last month with Fox Business Network, Sessions remarked that he was “uncomfortable” with how the FBI’s investigation into Clinton was conducted. The FBI ultimately recommended against charges for her “extremely careless” handling of classified materials.

Sessions said there should have been a grand jury and that the people who were granted immunity should have been “grilled” and forced to “tell us everything under oath,” noting that “people will surprise you how sometimes they’ll just spill the beans when they’re under oath like that.”

He added that there was “sufficient evidence to bring a charge” and argued that Attorney General Loretta Lynch abandoned her responsibility by simply accepting FBI Director James Comey’s recommendation not to pursue charges.

“The FBI director can make a recommendation to her, but she’s the one that decides whether or not to bring a case before a grand jury,” he said. “I didn’t like that.”

Trump’s campaign did not immediately return requests to clarify whether Conway was officially confirming the MSNBC report.

During the second presidential debate in October, Trump vowed to instruct his attorney general to appoint a special prosecutor to examine Clinton’s email practices. However, several days after he was elected, Trump told Lesley Stahl during a “60 Minutes” interview that he was “going to think about” whether he would follow through with the special prosecutor. He also said the Clintons are “good people” and that “I don’t want to hurt them.”

“I’m going to think about it,” he said. “I feel that I want to focus on jobs, I want to focus on health care, I want to focus on the border and immigration and doing a really great immigration bill. We want to have a great immigration bill. And I want to focus on — all of these other things that we’ve been talking about.”

Matt Miller, a former spokesman with the Department of Justice, tweeted Tuesday morning that Trump would be violating the Justice Department’s independence if he ordered his attorney general to pursue an investigation.

“If Trump has directed Sessions what investigations to pursue, or not pursue, that is a major violation of DOJ independence from the WH,” Miller stated. “This is a disaster for DOJ's independence. Imagine if @davidplouffe was announcing things @EricHolder would/wouldn't investigate in 2008.”

Conway said the type of combative language and promises Trump relied on to attack Clinton in his stump speeches are likely in the rearview mirror.

“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 aren't among them,” she said.