Clinton
gets late break in battle with Trump
Comey’s
decision to not revive email case against Clinton throws another
curveball into the presidential race.
By GABRIEL
DEBENEDETTI 11/7/16, 7:42 AM CET Updated 11/7/16, 7:52 AM CET
Another day, another
bombshell.
The ever-turbulent
presidential race took another dramatic turn on Sunday afternoon as
FBI Director James Comey revealed in a letter to Congress that
newly-discovered messages would not affect his bureau’s decision
that Hillary Clinton did not deserve prosecution — a revelation
that comes a little more than a week after Comey first set the race
into a frenzy.
The development —
immediately cheered by Democrats — is a major relief to Clinton,
who is spending the closing hours of her campaign fighting off Donald
Trump’s mad fly-around to try to find a path to 270 electoral
votes.
But Clinton and her
team played it cool, with the candidate declining to bring up the
issue at her afternoon rally, and her chief spokeswoman expressing
more enthusiasm about Bruce Springsteen joining Clinton on the trail
Monday.
“We have seen
Director Comey’s latest letter to the Hill. We are glad to see that
he has found, as we were confident that he would, that he has
confirmed the conclusion that he reached in July,” said Clinton’s
communications director Jennifer Palmieri, shortly before the
candidate appeared at her final Ohio rally, introduced by basketball
superstar LeBron James. “And we’re glad that this matter is
resolved.”
She added, “I have
one other thing to tell you: we are adding a guest to our rally
tomorrow night in Philadelphia,” as she hyped The Boss.
But Republicans,
eager to see Trump continue to close in on Clinton’s stable but
narrow lead, were not letting the matter rest.
“The FBI’s
findings from its criminal investigation of Hillary Clinton’s
secret email server were a damning and unprecedented indictment of
her judgment,” said Republican National Committee Chairman Reince
Priebus. “None of this changes the fact that the FBI continues to
investigate the Clinton Foundation for corruption involving her
tenure as secretary of state. Hillary Clinton should never be
president.”
And House Speaker
Paul Ryan, one of Trump’s most tortured supporters, quickly pitched
in to boost his nominee, as well. “Regardless of this decision, the
undisputed finding of the FBI’s investigation is that Secretary
Clinton put our nation’s secrets at risk and in doing so
compromised our national security,” he said. “She simply believes
she’s above the law and always plays by her own rules … Let’s
bring the Clinton era to an end by voting for Donald Trump on
Tuesday.”
Trump’s own
campaign was defiant, saying Comey’s letter changes nothing about
the perception of Clinton’s corruption or Trump’s chances on
Tuesday.
“We have not made
this a centerpiece of our messaging,” Trump’s campaign manager
Kellyanne Conway said on MSNBC said, despite Trump calling the
initial news “worse than Watergate.”
“Some things
haven’t changed at all. What FBI Director Comey said on July 7th
under oath to Congress is still the same. That she was reckless and
careless in her handling of information…the reason that so many
Americans have a problem with Hillary Clinton’s honesty and
trustworthiness and veracity does not change,” Conway said.
She also broke with
Trump’s statement just on Friday in which he said he’s “always
had a lot of confidence in the FBI.”
“I immediately
thought that he’s mishandled the investigation from the beginning,”
Conway said about Comey.
Still, Democrats’
feeling of vindication was mixed with a heavy dose of anxiety: nine
days of early voting went by since Comey’s initial letter shook the
race.
And his Sunday
afternoon letter to congressional leaders came as tensions between
Clinton and Trump’s camps near their highest points of the cycle.
While her Republican
challenger flies around the country in pursuit of any path to victory
— hitting reliably Democratic states like Minnesota and others
where early voting put Clinton firmly in the driver’s seat, like
Nevada — Clinton is piling resources into Michigan, a blue state
where her campaign has long had a presence but where it acknowledges
polls have tightened.
Both campaigns are
guardedly optimistic about the sudden turn to Michigan: while
Democrats acknowledge that the state is closer than they expected it
to be at this point, they see last-minute visits from Clinton, former
president Bill Clinton, and President Barack Obama as an insurance
policy to stave off a last-second Trump surge while an unprecedented
wave of Hispanic voters appears to have handed her unexpected
strength in Florida, Nevada, and Arizona.
To Trump’s team,
it’s evidence that the race has tightened to the point where
Clinton needs to play defense — even though no respected survey of
the notoriously difficult-to-poll state has shown Trump tied or ahead
there all year.
And on Sunday
morning, the final NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll of the cycle
landed with Clinton ahead of Trump by four points nationwide, 44 to
40 percent — roughly the same margin as other national polls have
recently shown. A POLITICO/Morning Consult poll also released Sunday
morning reaffirmed the small-but-steady lead, showing the Democratic
nominee with a three-point cushion, 45 percent to Trump’s 42
percent.
But far from
settling into a groove, a restless energy has overtaken the contest,
as Clinton avoided mentioning the FBI news on Sunday in Cleveland —
after stopping through a Philadelphia church — and Trump strove to
stay on message in Iowa and Minnesota.
Trump’s team in
particular has been on high alert after the real estate developer was
rushed from the Reno stage on Saturday night when an audience
member’s sign was mistaken for a gun and the Secret Service tackled
him. Both Donald Trump Jr., the candidate’s son, and Dan Scavino,
the campaign’s social media chief, retweeted a supporter’s
message calling the moment an “assassination attempt,” despite
all evidence to the contrary.
And emboldened by
his furious fly-around, Trump amped up his similarly unfounded claims
of election-rigging, even calling Clinton’s late-campaign concerts
featuring celebrities like Jay Z, Beyonce, and Katy Perry “almost
like a form of cheating” and “demeaning to the political
process.”
Meanwhile,
apparently pointing to long lines at a heavily Latino polling place
in Nevada that forced the location to stay open late, Trump
questioned whether there had been any improper activity at “certain
key Democratic polling locations in Clark County.”
“Folks, it’s a
rigged system. It’s a rigged system, and we’re going to beat it,”
he said.
“The
campaign’s made it very clear: a clear outcome, obviously both
sides will accept” — Mike Pence
“The campaign’s
made it very clear: a clear outcome, obviously both sides will
accept,” Trump’s running mate, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, said on
Fox News Sunday. “I think both campaigns have also been very clear
that in the event of disputed results, they reserve all legal rights
and remedies.”
Seeking to further
rev up his base on Sunday, the Trump campaign sent supporters a
battleground map showing Nevada, Florida, North Carolina, and Maine
leaning red, with Arizona, Utah, and Georgia firmly in the Republican
camp and Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, and Virginia
in the toss-up category — categorizations that do not fit the
public polling.
Clinton, meanwhile,
was visiting Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New Hampshire on Sunday in a bid
to energize African-American voters in Cuyahoga County one more time
with a joint rally with LeBron James, and to energize her supporters
in the other two states where there’s been no early voting.
Still dogged by
lagging African-American turnout and the ongoing release of campaign
chairman John Podesta’s emails by WikiLeaks after what appears to
be a Russian hack, the campaign is fighting the perception that it’s
trudging to the finish line.
“I’ve got pretty
thick skin, Chuck. So you know, what I’ve worried about is to make
sure that, you know, this is an unprecedented situation where a
foreign power hacked my emails as with WikiLeaks and Julian Assange
to dribble them out in order to maximize the damage to Hillary and to
maximize the help to Donald Trump, who’s adopted — essentially —
Russian foreign policy and rejected bipartisan U.S. foreign policy,”
Podesta said on NBC’s “Meet The Press.” “So it’s kind of an
unprecedented circumstance. But look, my job is to make sure that
we’re doing what we need to do to make sure that those volunteers
are on doors, on the phones. And that’s what we’re going to do to
win this election.”
Yet Clinton’s
campaign’s lingering confidence is largely buoyed by early-voting
figures in Nevada and Florida. A surge of Latino voters in Las Vegas’
Clark County, for example, pushed Democrats’ lead in early voting
to 72,000 ballots — larger than it was four years ago, when Obama
won the state by nearly 7 points.
And in Florida,
Latino voters have cast roughly 14 percent of the early and absentee
votes, far ahead of their 2012 pace, when Obama narrowly beat Mitt
Romney there.
“We’ve built a
different kind of coalition and a bigger coalition,” said Podesta.
“You mentioned the historic Hispanic turnout that we’re seeing in
Florida, Nevada, where we feel very, very good.”
With Clinton
clinging to a small but sturdy lead, Trump on Sunday kept up his talk
of a “rigged” election, keeping alive the prospect that he might
not accept a defeat on Tuesday.
“You have to
understand it’s a rigged system and she’s protected,” he said
at his Minnesota rally.
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