Donald Trump supporters are lashing out at the president-elect for backing down from prosecuting Hillary Clinton over her use of a private email server.
His team said he would not keep his campaign pledge to try to have her jailed, and Mr Trump later said it would be too divisive to go ahead with.
The FBI cleared her of any criminality but chants of “lock her up” became a rallying cry at his campaign events.
Conservatives seized on the news as a “betrayal” and a “broken promise”.
Redstate.com said that a failure to appoint a special prosecutor, as he promised, would reveal the “very real fact that the candidate is not who he claimed to be”.
The right-wing Breitbart News Network, one of the Manhattan billionaire’s most loyal supporters, denounced the climb-down as a “broken promise”.
Conservative commentator Ann Coulter tweeted her reaction to the news, saying: “Whoa! I thought we elected @realDonaldTrump president. Did we make him the FBI, & DOJ? His job is pick those guys, not do their jobs.”
She later followed up to say that: “No president shld be blocking investigators from doing their jobs. #EqualUnderLaw”
The right-leaning legal organisation Judicial Watch said it was “a betrayal of his promise to the American people to ‘drain the swamp’ of out-of-control corruption in Washington”.
