After the FBI Director recommended no criminal charges be brought to bear on Hillary Clinton, the reaction from Republicans was swift and oft-putting.
Speaker Paul Ryan attacked Comey saying his announcment "defies explanation" and vowed to haul him up to a hearing.
Rudy Giuliani cried that "no one should be above the law."
Trump immediately tweeted that the system was rigged.
The system is rigged. General Petraeus got in trouble for far less. Very very unfair! As usual, bad judgment.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 5, 2016
He's not only attacking Hillary Clinton, but the entire FBI.
But as is his nature, Trump then took it a step further into Crazy town, by using an anonymous source in a NY Times report, and then claimed that AG Loretta Lynch had been bribed by Hillary.
At Tuesday's North Carolina rally, Donald Trump said, "She said today that we may consider the attorney general to go forward. That's like a bribe isn't it? Isn't that sort of a bribe? I think it's a bribe."
He continued getting angrier, "How can you say that? It's a bribe!
"The attorney General is sitting there saying I'm going to have four more years or eight more years, but if she loses I'm out of a job. Its a BRIBE!"
Trump can't help himself when he's on stage in front of his peeps. He's riding high on endorphins and the bubble of invincibility when one is performing for a couple of thousand people. There's no greater feeling in the world. I know from experience.
But this is not a rock concert, this is a presidential campaign and you can't let your ego and emotions run rampant, which is something Trump cannot control. His fans adore his antics, but it destroys his credibility to everyone else and makes him look like a nut.
Greg Sargent writes for the Washington post that Republicans have only themselves to blame.
As we’ve already seen with Benghazi, Republicans don’t ever stop, no matter how many investigations fail to turn up that single devastating piece of evidence of Clinton perfidy and lawbreaking they are looking for. The same may prove true in the case of the emails. As Bloomberg Politics puts it, Ryan is basically helping Trump “whip up conspiracy theories over the FBI process” in a manner designed mainly to “rally the base,” but which “may do little to convince general election voters” that the fix was in.
Democratic strategist Robert Shrum predicts that Republicans will overreach once again on the emails: “I think it will go about as well as the Republicans did on Whitewater or Benghazi or anything else. I just think it’s fundamentally over.” I wouldn’t dismiss the possibility that Clinton, whose trust numbers are dismal, could sustain further damage. But GOP overreach now looks like a very real possibility. If so, the problem here isn’t necessarily just Trump. It’s the broader GOP willingness to play these games to “rally the base.” And it’s possible this will be priced into the broader public reaction to GOP criticism of Clinton over the emails, perhaps helping mitigate what could otherwise be more damaging.
They've cried wolf about the Clintons for three decades. It's over.
