November 2016

President-elect Donald Trump has decided that he won’t seek criminal investigations related to former rival Hillary Clinton’s private e-mail server or her family foundation, his campaign manager said.

President-elect Trump’s apparent decision, conveyed by Kellyanne Conway in an interview on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,’’ is a change from his campaign rhetoric, in which he issued incendiary calls for a special prosecutor to reopen the FBI’s closed investigation of Clinton’s use of a private server while serving as secretary of state and had also urged investigations of allegations of corruption at the Clinton Foundation. He nicknamed the Democratic nominee “Crooked Hillary” and encouraged chants of “Lock her up!” at his rallies. President-elect Trump’s decision to pursue or not pursue a criminal investigation from the Oval Office would be an extraordinary break with political and legal protocol, which holds that the attorney general and FBI make decisions on whether to conduct investigations and file charges, free of pressure from the president. Conway said President-elect Trump sees things differently. “I think when the president-elect, who’s also the head of your party, tells you before he’s even inaugurated that he doesn’t wish to pursue these charges, it sends a very strong message, tone and content” to fellow Republicans, she said. “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 are not among them,” she added.

In staffing his Federal Communications Commission transition team, President-elect Donald Trump has tapped a pair of American Enterprise Institute (AEI) veterans and free market de-regulators in Jeffrey Eisenach and Mark Jamison.

While it is tough to predict whether the merger-threatening populist Donald Trump (he has said he opposes AT&T-Time Warner and would unwind Comcast-NBCU) or the regulation-threatening Trump (he wants two regulations axed for each new one added) will set the tone for the FCC, the choice of the transition team leadership could be instructive. Eisenach and Jamison are linked at the communications deregulatory hip by AEI, a free market think tank. While Eisenach has gotten attention as a key overall transition team member for his deregulatory views, including on network neutrality, Jamison's appointment adds some new deregulatory punch. "Regulation is about disappointing people at a rate that they can endure," Jamison has written. But he is clearly out to "disappoint" people less. Jamison says most of the reasons for having an FCC have "gone away," in part because he says there are few telecom network monopolies, and ISPs are rarely among those few. That is quite the difference from the Wheeler FCC's emphasis on ISP gatekeepers to justify various regulatory approaches, including net neutrality and broadband privacy rules, both of which are likely to get a second look under a Republican chair.

President-elect Donald Trump will ask the Defense Department and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff “to develop a comprehensive plan to protect America’s vital infrastructure from cyberattacks and all other form of attacks,” according to a video posted Nov 21. President-elect Trump included the plan in a list of “executive actions we can take on day one to restore our laws and bring back our jobs.” Other items on the list included withdrawing from the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, removing rules that limit energy exploration and ramping up visa fraud investigations. The cyber protection pledge may be a slight modification of a plan the incoming president posted to his campaign site in October. That plan called for an investigation of cyber vulnerabilities in critical infrastructure conducted by a “cyber review team” that would include members from the military, law enforcement and the private sector.