Donald Trump and his mouthpieces have now said that he won't call for Hillary Clinton to be prosecuted for the phony email server and Clinton Foundation scandals.
Trump is making the "I'm such a nice guy" excuse for stopping the persecution: “It’s just not something that I feel very strongly about. I don’t want to hurt the Clintons, I really don’t. She went through a lot and suffered greatly in many different ways.”
Rush Limbaugh is making the "It's just not done" excuse: “I never expected Trump to actually prosecute her. And the reason is…I’m falling back on what some of the standard protocols for politics are after victory and this just, we in America do not prosecute defeated political enemies...If he did it, it was going to be icing on the cake for me. But I never expected him to do it.”
In other words, Limbaugh knew Trump was just blowing smoke when he said that. Many of Trump's supporters seem to believe this about his other promises as well: the ban on Muslims, the deportation of immigrants, draining the swamp, firing lobbyists, starting a trade war, bringing back jobs, and on and on. It was all just red meat to fire up the crowds.
Trump's more delusional supporters are fervently hoping that Trump is lying now rather than lying back then: by saying he'll stop persecuting Clinton, Trump will give Obama a false sense of security so that he doesn't preemptively pardon Clinton before he leaves office. That's what Republicans Gerald Ford and George H. W. Bush did when they preemptively pardoned Dick Nixon and the Iran-Contra conspirators. They nobly pardoned their cronies to "heal the nation."
But the most logical reason Trump won't push this is that there's no chance that it would actually result in a conviction: after literally years of congressional and FBI investigations into the email server, Benghazi and the Clinton Foundation, it's obvious that there's nothing there. Trump was just throwing out tired, disproved allegations to fire up the know-nothings at his rallies, giving them something mindless to chant and rant about.
It is these nitwits who are outraged that Trump is breaking his promise to "trump the bitch."
But the real reason he's calling off the dogs is that Trump is making an unspoken deal with the Democrats. And that has to do with Trump's own foundation.
The Clinton Foundation is a legitimate charity that has served tens of millions of the poorest people in the world, helping to prevent malaria and unwanted pregnancies, treat HIV, pneumonia and diarrhea, as well as sponsor midwife and childhood nutrition programs. It does real charity work.
The Donald J. Trump Foundation, however, doesn't do anything of the sort. Trump doesn't even contribute to it. It's basically a slush fund that Trump uses to buy things like a portrait of himself and a Tim Tebow helmet. He also used the foundation's money -- donated by other people -- to pay off hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal settlements incurred by his businesses.
Going after the Clinton Foundation would almost certainly invite retaliatory investigations into the Trump Foundation, which is clearly just a money-laundering and tax avoidance scheme. The most damning evidence is the fact that Trump's foundation paid an IRS fine for making an illegal $25,000 donation to Pam Bondi's reelection campaign for the attorney general of Florida.
This looks like a quid pro quo: it appears that in exchange for the donation and a fund raiser Trump hosted that raised $150K for her campaign, Bondi dropped the Florida Trump University fraud investigation. Just last week Trump settled three other fraud cases for $25 million. Buying Bondi off for $25K probably saved Trump another $10 or $20 million. What an investment!
This is why just yesterday Trump was forced to announce that foundation money wouldn't be used to pay off the $25 million fraud settlement.
No, by letting Clinton off the hook Trump is clearly angling to pressure Democratic attorneys general in New York and California to ease up on the Trump Foundation. He can always change his mind and go after Clinton if the Democrats don't play ball.
On the other hand, investigations into the Trump Foundation could be a blessing in disguise for Republicans. A lot of them still despise Trump, and would love to see him go down. They may quietly urge New York A.G. Eric Schneiderman to go ahead with his investigation. Then they can use whatever Schneiderman digs up at Trump's impeachment trial.
And then they can install the man they really want to be president: Mike Pence.
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